Dawn Of Eternity
by unbidden16
Summary: The Creators have resurfaced and they are displeased with the path their creations have followed. It is up to the Primanar and her allies to defend their new home against the destruction the Creators seek to lay upon them. The road to Life rests in that direction, but at what cost? What are they willing to sacrifice? Continuation of AtSitS, SSaSS, SofS, and EtS by unbidden16.
1. Chapter One: Ancestry

**Chapter One: Ancestry  
**

" _In today's news, I am excited to report that the excavation that has been taking place in Antarctica for the last decade has finally borne fruits for the ceaseless efforts of the geologists and terraformists of Sparrowback." Kaitlyn Mathers, the anchorwoman for News Channel STN, was beaming from ear to ear._

" _Our sources tell us that beneath the frozen wastes of the southern-most desert of our world is a layer of immaculately preserved prehistoric landscape. I have been told that an entire ecosystem had been cyberformed long before the human species walked this Earth and we are now fortunate enough to be granted a once in a lifetime view of the prehistoric world this Earth once was._

" _With me today is the head archeologist of Sparrowback, Johnathan Kirby, and Neutral Cybertronian, Hatchback. These two have been working side by side to unearth this marvel for our eager eyes. Sirs, please, tell me how it is that you came to find this…"_

Ryder Erikson flicked the television off with a grunt, not in the mood today to listen to the incessantly cheerful woman's banter.

He'd had one of the longest nights of his life last night. The dreams were coming more regularly and were beginning to interfere with his day-to-day life. He'd tossed and turned for most of the night and the little sleep he did get was plagued by _her_.

He didn't even know who she was!

The woman from his dreams used to visit when he was a growing boy. He'd never seen her face then just as he had never seen her face to this day. Light surrounded her and distorted her to the point that she almost seemed formless and comprised of variating colors. Her voice was light, but seductive. Where it had soothed him in his childhood it now aroused. She didn't speak in words he understood, but there was always a feeling of welcome and comfort when she visited him in his dreams.

She'd been his own personal Angel growing up.

He'd been born with a heart defect that had only grown worse in the first few years of his life. While his family wasn't poor and made an honest living on Tall Oaks, the ranch passed down through the generations of his family, heart transplants were damned near impossible for a three-year-old even in this day in age. They'd all but given up hope when a miracle presented itself. A Synth-Organ, a synthetic heart that was a perfect amalgamation of human and Cybertronian tech, had turned up at the closest city's hospital to his home town.

Synth-Organs were introduced to the human populace nearly twenty years after the Fall of Chicago, which had occurred late in 2014. The inventor of the Synths was the infamous Samantha Jane Witwicky, former human and reigning dignitary of the Cybertronian race. At one point in time the Synths had been celebrated, the need for donated organs becoming a thing of the past. The failure rate of the Synths was almost zero as a genetic match was unnecessary. The medinats, a Cybertronian medical nanite, adhered the Synth on a basic level to a person's body and made rejection impossible.

It was unfortunate that, in the proceeding centuries, Cemetery Wind had enough of a backing that the Synths were boycotted at most hospitals across the planet. The CW were a group of rebels, _insurgents_ , that were against everything alien to planet Earth. They were purists through and through. Anything that even hinted at Cybertronian involvement was warred against with a passion not seen since the Dark Ages. As the years passed and the Witwicky woman lived well past the normal lifespan of her supposedly human origins, the CW had begun its campaign to rid the Earth of anything of her creation.

How San Antonio, Texas had managed to scrounge up a Synth heart and – out of all the hundreds of patients on that donor list – have his name come up for the transplant, he would never know. No one knew. His parents hadn't questioned the miracle, however.

That had been the first time _she_ had visited him in his dreams. She wasn't his first memory, but she was close to it. She hadn't spoken the foreign words to him while he'd been in that recovery room at the hospital when he was alone and scared, but he'd felt only warmth and safety radiating off of her. She'd assured him in her own mercurial way that he would be well. She would watch over him.

Over the years he grew rapidly. He towered over other children his age and until he'd built up the muscle mass to defend himself physically against the bullies that wished to take on the 'freak', she'd come to him during his lowest moments to comfort him. He could almost feel her hand running through his hair and her melodic voice speaking gently into his ear. She'd been there through his first break-up with his high school sweetheart and then through the nightmare of his parents' ill-fated death at the hands of a drunk driver.

She was always there when he needed her the most.

He was thirty-six years old now. As an only child, he'd inherited the ranch and the rest of his parents' estate. Before the death of his parents he'd attended college to become a doctor. He'd been at the very end of his fifth year of residency when the accident happened. After that, he'd halfway given up on his dream, though occasionally his expertise was put to use with the various ranch-hands coming to him from a goring by an ornery bull or a particularly well-placed kick by a skittish colt.

She'd come to him more regularly in this last year, her presence still a soothing balm to his soul, but her overall intent was distinctly different. There was tension between them that had never been. There was _heat_. Not once had the dreams escalated to anything physical, but he still awoke like a randy teenager and in need of a brutally cold shower.

For three weeks she'd come to him every night, without fail, and he was so sleep-deprived that he was wholly tempted to buy a whole flock of sheep just to try counting them until he struck unconsciousness.

Or he'd give in to temptation and take one of those God-awful pharmaceutical pills that would knock his big ass out until Thanksgiving if he were lucky.

Grumbling to himself, he marched out of the main house and made his way to the stables. He left the door unlocked as he always did. His property was massive, a sprawling four-hundred acres. No one came to Tall Oaks to steal. Even if they wished to go through the hassle of traipsing across all his land, they'd have to face any of the ranch hands or, Heaven help them, himself. Ryder was a doctor, but at his core he was as stubborn and ornery as one of his prized bulls.

Harvey, his primary hand for the horses, already had Grimm saddled up. Ryder tipped his head, the brim of his black Stetson shadowing his eyes for a bare second, before climbing onto the saddle of the big beast.

Grimm was a specially bred Shire Horse, a whopping twenty-four hands tall. His family had begun breeding the supersized horses over three-hundred years ago. The men in his family were large as a rule and he was by far the biggest born in the last couple generations. The necessity of a sturdy, steady mount was just that…entirely mandatory. While they still had any range of traditional breeds, there were currently five Big-Shires on the ranch. There were dozens of others across the continental U.S. from the same brutishly large stock.

Grimm's coat was a white base speckled throughout with dusky grey. Near his hooves the coloring tapered off to black and his face, with the exception of a dappled strip of white down his muzzle, was pure obsidian. His eyes were so brilliant a shade of brown that they appeared red. His father, Russel, had called the newly-born foal the Grim Reaper borne into the body of a sure-to-be titanic sized stallion. The name stuck.

Ryder branched off to the southern side of his property to check on the condition of some of the fencing there, letting Harvey know that he had his walkie if anybody needed him. His foreman, Clyde, was a competent man and rarely needed input from his boss on what needed to be done on the day-to-day. He preferred it that way. Competent hands gave him his chance to ride off and think in peace.

As he rode, he inadvertently found himself looking up into the partly-cloudy sky. The Grid snuck in and out of the cloud cover in some places and higher up he knew it rested uninterrupted. From the old school books he knew there had been a time that the Grid wasn't there. There were no drifting alien cities, affectionately termed Flotillas by the human race, coasting over the landscape. The Fall of Chicago had been in 2014 and it had been four-hundred and sixty-three years since then. All that time and so many generations of humans, no one was alive to remember when Earth was _only_ Earth.

 _No_ , he corrected himself, _not no one_.

The Cybertronians that now shared their planet and orbited it in even more 'cities' which had at one point been a part of their old planet, Cybertron, would remember. They strived to help the humans help themselves. They wished to see their fledgling race flourish and become great on their own and for that, Ryder respected them.

For all the hype the CW put out on the Frequency, Ryder didn't think the Cybertronians were a negative addition to their way of life at all. They helped the human race advance where they could, such as in the medical field, and coached them along in others. There were 'Transformers' in respectable positions all across the globe including that one, Hatchback, that was a part of the archeological dig in Antarctica. Heck, the nearest town to his ranch had a femme, the female of their species, working in the lumber yard. That alien had an eye for the best stock of wood for whatever purpose it was needed. Plus she wasn't afraid to do the heavy lifting.

A Flotilla drifted overhead lazily, momentarily blocking out his ray of sunshine until Grimm carried him out of its shadow. Squinting up at it, he could see that it wasn't inhabited. So many of the floating cities were in need of repairs. If the news was accurate at all, only about one-fifth of the restorations had been made to the cities.

There were innovations that removed the necessity of oil to operate cars and with those innovations came the development of a flying vehicle. While most humans preferred to stay on the ground, there were public transports up to some of the reconstructed cities. Up on those Flotilla's there was little to no animosity between the races. It was like stepping into a different world. He'd been on a few of them during his residency. Eliptis and Vortexicon were immaculately clean and boasted equal entertainment options for both human and automatous machine. There were also so-far insurmountable Shields protecting them from a rogue CW missile.

Those bastards just couldn't leave well enough alone.

The only objection he had to the Flotillas was that they never stayed in one place. He just couldn't understand how in the world the aliens kept track of them! Forget geographical markers. It was like waking up on a cruise ship. One day you could be leaving New York City and the next you could be waking up in Bermuda.

His ears twitched as he neared the fences he was looking for. The wind whistled through the oak trees scattered over his property. Water lapped at the dock settled in the pond at this side of the ranch. He could hear the delicate chimes beside the well-maintained swing tinkling on the breeze. There was something else, however…

The distinct crack of gunfire had him kicking Grimm into a gallop. Grimm shook his greyish-black mane out before charging off. The horse wasn't shy around guns and neither was his rider.

If someone was poaching on his land, he was going to teach them a lesson in manners that they weren't soon to forget.

He was pulling his phaser, an older-model shotgun-styled laser cannon, from the holster on his saddle when caught sight of them.

There was a person, difficult to distinguish at this distance between male or female, flying like a bat out of hell on a Flite-Dek towards his general direction. The hoverboard was a fairly new invention and was incredibly expensive. The suit they were wearing was also newer, a high-quality multi-alloy covering that kept its wearer from becoming grated cheese against the ground if they crashed. The helmet was mostly visor to the front, but didn't allow him the luxury of classifying who it was encroaching on his home.

Several yards away were two trucks. The flying variety. The passengers of the two bulky vehicles were firing off caustic rounds in the direction of the Flyer on the Flite-Dek. One missed striking the board by mere feet. The Flyer wavered, their hands dropping down to grip the narrow, glowing board between their covered fingers. Ryder's stomach dropped for a moment, thinking he was going to watch the person fall. They were in the air over eighty-feet. Even wearing the protective suit, they were bound to break a few bones.

Without thinking, he aimed his phaser for the power core of one of the nearest trucks. He didn't know who was the guilty party in this situation, nor did he care. No one came onto his land with the intention of hurting another human being. He didn't condone in-fighting between his hands and he certainly wasn't going to cotton to it with strangers.

His shot rang true, the lightspeed 'bullet' zeroing in on the core as the vehicle tipped upward due to a strong draft of wind. With the engine sputtering out, the truck continued to flip backwards before striking the grass below with force. His eyes boggled when, almost immediately, the vehicle exploded in a flare of light and flames.

 _That_ wasn't supposed to happen.

The explosion rocked the other truck forward, sending it careening towards the Flyer quicker and haphazardly. The unfortunate Flyer struck the windshield of the truck as it rocketed past them. It was only their grip on the Flite-Dek that kept them from plummeting down to the ground. As it was, the Flyer arrowed with zero control towards the pond.

Ryder was steering Grimm towards the crashing Flyer, his phaser aiming for the power core of the second out-of-control truck as he did so. He caught a glimpse of the Cemetery Wind logo stamped on the driver's side panel of the vehicle before it, too, erupted into flame. This time, however, he was able to see a string of blue 'light' flicker out between the gaping expanse of the truck on the Flotilla above his property.

 _What the fuck?_ He wondered to himself. The floating city wasn't inhabited. It wasn't in the middle of repairs and yet, unquestionably, a rampart had broken apart so that a disturbingly powerful missile could strike against the CW trucks. It was closing up even as he blinked, as though it had never done anything in the first place. He'd never seen a Flotilla preform an offensive strike before.

Ever.

The sound of a splash drew his startled gaze back to the Flyer. They had fallen from the Flite-Dek and struck the deeper end of the pond. The Dek whizzed through the air with no pilot and struck the side of the towering Live Oak beside the water. The thin, yet formidable metal imbedded itself into the trunk of the tree, its glow diminishing as it turned itself off.

Ryder urged Grimm faster, all but throwing himself from the saddle as the Flyer unsteadily worked the suit off. The helmet was tossed first and had undoubtedly sunk to the bottom and the suit was quickly on its way to joining in the watery grave.

"Shit!" He cursed, shucking his boots off quicker than he had ever managed in his life and dove into the pond from the dock. His clothes were going to be waterlogged, but the suit the Flyer was struggling to remove would sink them in moments. He didn't know how they were managing to tread water in the first place. It had to be a strong person to carry the weight of a seventy-five-pound alloy suit at the top of the water.

He reached the back of the Flyer just as they were tiring. He was to their back and could see only a tight, coiled mass of white-blonde hair. Their chin was barely over the water's surface and they were panting heavily.

"I gotcha," he told the Flyer as calmly as he could manage. He sunk down beneath the surface and blindly reached for wherever the Flyer had managed to get the suit down to. Had he been able to open his eyes in the murky water he'd have widened them in surprise. The suit was already down to the person's calves.

He pulled at the heavy, booted soles on the Flyer's feet. That was another mass of weight that had been dragging them down. First the right coasted out of his hand towards the sooty bottom of the pond and then the left. No sooner had he pulled the second boot from surprisingly dainty feet did the Flyer shimmy the rest of the suit off. Bubbles of air tickled up past his face as he rose beside the smaller human being.

"I gotcha," he repeated, more for his benefit than theirs at this point. The Flyer was gasping now, shakily attempting to swim towards the pond's edge. He banded his arm from behind around the person's trim waist, gulping when he felt the heavy weight of breasts against his forearms, and whirled them both so that she was buoyed slightly above him. He took on her slight weight and began an awkward backstroke to shore. "Just breathe calm, little missy. I gotcha."

Her hands tremored as they clawed into his forearm. She was kicking with him, trying her damndest to help him get them out quicker.

Had he not been so drenched, the fine hairs on the back of his neck and arms would have stood on end at the faint whiff of ozone followed by a pop in the air. Still swimming, he looked back over his shoulder to see a single Transformer, a former Decepticon judging by the purple insignia on its chest plates, was running pall-mall into the water. It's wide back wings signaled that this was one of _their_ Flyers.

Red eyes, optics, honed in on the woman braced over his chest.

The Decepticon didn't speak. He reached forward with both clawed hands and cupped them around the both of them. The result was having him against the surprisingly warm metal with the little bit of a woman draped backwards across his front. They were carried the rest of the way out of the water and deposited onto dry land.

Ryder was instantly moving them so that the woman was lying on the ground instead of on him. He ignored the titan hovering above them both and instead focused on the slight frame of the shivering woman.

"Shit," he hissed, eyes training in on the blood stain in her soaked peach-hued blouse. He raised the hem swiftly, but carefully, seeing that the wound was long and jagged. It wasn't terribly deep, but it would need stitches. A whole lot of stitches.

Two golden hands, the nails painted a pretty pale purple, pressed against his far larger hands. His worried gaze snapped up for the first time to her face. Recognition ignited in his mind, but somewhere in his chest near the region of his heart he felt a soul-deep connection shudder to life. He _knew_ this woman.

Her visage was beautiful even with the horrific scarring that cut across the right side of her face. It cut a massive line down from her temple, through her right brow, over her eye and cheek bone, abruptly slicing her rosy pink upper lip. Beyond the scar, however, was shimmering golden skin and adorable dimples to the sides of her smiling lips. She had tiny ears and hair whitish-blonde, braided tightly back and several feet across the ground to the side of where he'd lain her. And her eyes…

Both were irises of lavender, shocks of blue and red streaking through the dominant purple coloration. The pupil of her left eye was normal, a solid black marble. The other, however, was as white as her corneas. It didn't dilate and only moved when she shifted her other eye, but he felt himself sucked into them both. Ryder had been sucker punched with less force than her eyes impacted him. He could look into them for an eternity and still not see enough of them.

"Hunter?" She whispered in her husky, seductress voice. His breath stuttered out. He knew that voice. It wasn't the nonsensical words he'd heard so many times before, but the voice was _hers_. She was his dream woman.

"Ryder," he corrected her shakily, cupping her scarred cheek. His hand encompassed almost the entire side of her face. She was so small compared to him. So finely shaped and perfect. Her skin was silky smooth and warm to the touch. His work-roughened fingers must irritate her delicate skin. He went to pull away only to have her clutch onto his wrist and drag his hand back up against her cheek.

"I'm sorry," she smiled sadly at him, not an ounce of physical pain showing on her face for the wound in her side. The wound… "You look so much like him."

"I'm a doctor," he cleared his throat and shook his head. It didn't help him clear his scatterbrained worshipful thoughts of her. He brutally fought off the tremor of his free hand when he lowered her shirt back down. Her stomach was firm, but didn't show her abs. He liked that. He loved when a woman looked soft, not hard like men did. He loved a woman that took care of her body, but didn't remove her femininity.

 _Get your head out of the gutter, man_ , he chided himself sternly.

"I'm pretty sure yer gonna need stitches, honey," the endearment slipped out without his consciously doing so. He didn't take it back, however. He couldn't. "I've got some supplies at my ranch. Yer gonna come with me so I can getcha patched right up. Okay?"

"Primanar," the mech that he'd up until that point tuned out spoke in a rasping, yet loud voice. He'd learned early on that none of them ever spoke quietly. They could soften their tones, but their voices were otherworldly. "Ratchet is still busied with the rebels, but I will inform Flatline. If you can wait but a breem I will have…"

"Hush, Skywarp," she quieted the dark-plated 'Con with a kindly smile. There were those dimples again. His heart tugged, wanting to leave him and burrow into her own chest beside her radiant soul. He had only just met her, had only seen her images on the television screens, but she was his dream woman. She was _his_. "Ryder here will fix me up just fine. It's only a flesh wound. Between him and Coldstone, I was able to slip off with minimal damage."

"You should not…"

"Do not question me," Samantha Witwicky snapped at the towering behemoth, her pale eyes glowing for a breath of time. Gooseflesh trailed his arms at hearing her voice go as suddenly deep and powerful as theirs. No, it was even more intense. He felt cowed by it and he had never been a man to shy away from anyone or anything.

"As you wish." Without another word spoken, the mech known now as Skywarp rose to his feet and stepped back away from them. He leveled Ryder with a withering glare before jettisoning into the air, shifting shape into an older-model Raptor, and darting off towards the Flotilla which had come to a standstill over his property.

Odd.

"He'll stay near. Coldstone is that city up there," Samantha's voice was back to normal. She beamed at him, raising her arms in a gesture meant to urge him into helping her rise. He didn't want to. Her wound would pinch if he helped her to sit and it would undoubtedly be painful for her. She'd shown little to no wavering. He idly noted that she must be an infinitely strong woman not only to bat away the pain she had to feel, but also to have kept herself afloat in the pond minutes before. "The rest of his Trine is settling a dispute otherwise they'd be hovering, too."

"I'm going to pick ya up as careful as I can so I don't hurt ya more, okay?" Her pleasantly curved brows furrowed when he didn't concede to her desire to sit up. He whistled for Grimm, who'd stood by stoically even when Skywarp had flown off, and the big horse trotted up beside him. His velvety muzzle snuffed against the woman's temple and the glimmering circlet that settled there. She giggled angelically, rubbing her palm with held-together fingers against tip of his muzzle.

Grimm chuffed, dancing on his hooves in excitement. Apparently, his stallion had just made a new friend.

"Stand still, you lummox," he growled at Grimm tersely. The beast pulled himself together, but kept swinging his head with enthusiasm. Ryder rolled his eyes even as the blonde chortled. He stooped, sliding his arms under her shoulders and knees, and lifted. She gasped, throwing her arms around his neck as best she could. It was his turn to chuckle. "Don't worry. I promise I gotcha. An itty-bitty thing like you ain't nothin' I can't handle."

"I bet." She kneaded her fingers into his shoulders, her eyes fixed onto his. He smiled down at her, so perfect in his arms. She had a hold on him. He couldn't even bring himself to want to shake her off. He'd never felt so out of control of himself in his life, but he knew with every fiber of his being that he wanted her.

"Down, Grimm," he commanded the Big-Shire. Grimm instantly brought himself down to his knees with his belly touching the grass. Ryder urged Samantha to grip his neck a little higher as he climbed over the back of his horse, the right hand she'd allowed free by holding him bracing against the horn. Once he was seated, Grimm stood back up with seamless grace. It wasn't the first time they had practiced such a maneuver.

"C'mon. I wanna get that cut cleaned before it gets infected."

"I trust you." She murmured into his chest just beneath the crook of his neck. He heard her sniff, inhaling his scent as much as he desperately breathed in her honey-clove fragrance. A soft sigh trickled from her lips.

 _Well now, if that don't just make a man feel ten feet tall_.

XxXxX

Samantha lay placidly on the leather couch she'd been deposited onto. Her eyes roved over the man stitching up her side with competence.

He looked so much like Hunter Mason.

This man, Ryder, was taller than Hunter had been. The late Hunter Mason had been a statuesque male of six-foot-eight. This brutish male was the single tallest human she'd ever met in her long years of life. He was over seven feet tall. There was no doubt about that. Maybe three inches taller. He was heavily muscled, and not the lean sort of musculature that certain men preferred or acquired through some sports. He was built like a tank. His face was the same. Wide chin and Icelandic blue eyes. His hair was darker, closer to ebony than brown, but was just as long as Hunter's had been. His skin tone was also copperier. Her brows knitted to see that it had a very faint shimmer to it not too dissimilar to how her skin now looked. Metallic.

She ached to reach out and touch him again. She wanted to feel his warm skin under her fingertips once more.

"All done," he reported in his drool-worthy drawl. His bright white smile was boyish and endearing, though when he'd looked down at her earlier, for just a moment, it had been predatory and wolfish. Her lower parts shivered with delight.

"You're very good at that," she complimented in turn, taking a quick peak at the tidy stitches he'd applied to her abdomen. Between them and the nanites, she'd be healed in a matter of a few days. He covered the sutures with a crisp white patch, taping it down firmly on all sides. "You said you were a doctor?"

"Yes, well, I was." He smirked at her, a lopsided smile that melted her into a puddle. No man should look as good as he did. "My folks died some years ago. I came back here to run this ranch after they'd passed it on tah me. Was in my fifth year of residency in Pembroke 'fore all that happened."

"I'm sorry," she murmured with genuine regret and sorrow for his loss.

"It's been a few years now." He shook his head, his nearly black hair catching glints of starlight from the soft white glow of the bulbs overheard. He went to stand, but she snatched his hand up in hers before he could pull away. He'd have been able to force himself out of her grip easily, his body a veritable powerhouse, but he didn't. His face showed as much reluctance as she thought hers did at the mere thought of moving away from each other.

"I lost my parents over four-hundred years ago. The pain diminishes, but you never forget." She clutched his hand up to her chest, looking steadfastly into his familiar eyes. They were so warm despite their coloration. "So I say again, from my heart, that I'm sorry for your loss."

"You really are her, aren't ya?" Clarification wasn't necessary. She knew what he meant and so just nodded her head. "What are ya doin' here? Why was the CW after ya? Aren't ya s'posed tah be doin' some _queenly_ duties or somethin'?"

"Primanar, not Queen," Sam corrected him with a faint smile. Ryder helped her to sit up against some throw pillows which had been on the couch before he tucked a quilted blanket over her lap. She choked on tears, recognizing the quilt from so many years ago. "The past five years have been the worst for all of us. Cemetery Wind is as strong as they're going to get and suppressing the insurgencies has become something of a nightmare in and of itself.

"The CW is working with a high-profile company, which is how they're managing to get the funding that they've needed all these years. They killed two of my mechs before we caught on to what they're trying to do. They're harvesting their metal in order to make new and better _human_ machines. Bullshit is what it is. They want to make robots modelled after the Cybertronians to destroy 'the alien blight' of our planet."

"You gotta be shitting me," Ryder's expression was thunderous. "They ain't been nothin' but a help to the human race since Chicago! The medical advancements alone…"

"We both know that and so does about ninety-five percent of the human race, but for being such a small faction, the CW has a strong foothold. People are afraid to stand up against them." Her brows furrowed and she found herself reaching out to poke a finger against Ryder's chest above where his heart lay underneath. "You have a Synth. I can hear the difference. I designed them, you know. Theoretically, a human could live two, maybe three-hundred years with the Synth-Organs if they otherwise take care of their bodies. This one saved your life…and the CW doesn't want it because they perceive it as foreign and not of this world. In truth, they rebel because, in all likelihood, they lost out on a massive cash-cow. If there's one thing I know about human nature, it's that we're greedy, self-righteous bastards."

"Can't really say as I disagree wit' ya there," Ryder grunted, shaking his head sadly. "God would be ashamed of us, I think. Always lookin' for the next step up even if that step is on the back of another."

"They caught me off guard," she told him with no small amount of self-loathing in her tone. "You see, after the first two of my mechs were offlined and their frames harvested for their metal, I started powering up some protoforms. I don't know how much you know about Cybertronian anatomy, but their protoforms are essentially just like our skeletal and muscular structures. No skin yet. No vital parts to keep everything where it needs to be, but important nonetheless since it's the very core of their bodies.

"It's possible to zap enough energy into a protoform and slap on identical armor plating to an otherwise living Cybertronian to have that protoform believably mimic its original. Uh, kinda like a walking, talking manikin. We've been able to fool the CW into thinking they've annihilated at least thirty of the highest ranking mechs and femmes on the planet while also giving them some of what they want."

"Lemme guess," Ryder was beginning to hover over her a bit, his gaze intense. Those eyes sent shivers down her spine. "You didn't bring an escort an' ended up gettin' yer pretty ass caught firing up one of those protoforms."

"Pretty much. Didn't have enough juice to just warp myself out of there and ended up hightailing it the old fashioned way." She winced. "Audrey's going to be pissed that I lost the suit and probably ruined the Flite-Dek."

"You almost got yerself killed and yer first thought is for some damned stuff?" The aghast way he spoke quickly morphed into righteous anger. "Someone shoulda spanked some sense into that ass of yers when ya was little, you stubborn filly."

"I have plenty of sense." She couldn't help but sneer at him for talking down to her. The outdated threat of a spanking didn't faze her in the slightest. "My downfall is that my caring for everyone else tends to put me in the thick of it."

"No, darlin', yer' knocked of some sense. Least you coulda done was take some protection an' don't tell me it was tah protect none of them big bastards I seen you on the news with. They ain't the ones needing protection." He tapped her nose in reprimand and she had to grit her teeth to keep from snapping at his finger in retaliation.

Samantha marveled that no one had told her off in years. Too many years to care to fathom, truth be told. She was four-hundred and eighty-seven years old – who in their right mind talked down to someone of such advanced years? Who dared to scold the Primanar of the Cybertronian race? Ryder did, apparently.

A sardonic smile tilted the corner of her lips on the good side upwards.

"It doesn't matter now. We were stalling, giving them some of what they wanted without losing any of our mechs while we tried to figure out what they were doing. There's something a little more beyond Cemetery Wind making their own army of automatons. Something a lot more sinister."

"Like what?"

She winced internally, knowing she'd spoken to him too much as it was. This wasn't Hunter Mason, close friend and dedicated soldier of N.E.S.T. This was Ryder Erikson, trained doctor and owner of Tall Oaks. He was no military vet. He didn't need to be drawn into the fray any more than he already was by simply having her in his home.

Speaking of which…

"Time for me to go," she spoke softly, pushing off the quilt he'd tucked around her. She was slow in standing, the nanites rapidly repairing her wound not quite diminishing the pain of it. Ryder lurched up onto his feet to brace her from behind with one of his hugely muscled forearms. His opposite hand gripped onto her wrist, steadying her when she threatened to buckled for half a second. Sparks danced across her skin where it contacted his deliciously warm body.

"I'm okay," the blonde assured him, stepping out from the cradle of his towering, protective body. He was potent.

"Don't," he murmured, reaching back out for her. He didn't quite touch her, but neither did he drop his arms. He seemed caught in mid-motion. Indecision was written plainly across his face. He wanted to touch her, to hold her – and dear Heaven she wanted that too – but he didn't quite act out on the impulse.

"I have to go."

"I want tah help." Ryder rumbled, his Icelandic eyes turning hard and cold. His shoulders squared, his imposing frame seeming to expand upon itself. "What can I do tah help?"

"Go back to your life, Ryder. It's best you forgot I was even here." Wistfully she smiled, her heart threatening mutiny. It hadn't troubled her so much since saying goodbye to Hunter so many years ago. The loss of her loved ones always hurt, yes, but nothing quite matched the soul-deep tearing that had taken place in saying goodbye to the ex-N.E.S.T. operative Hunter Mason. She was reflecting now that this moment felt dangerously close to overshadowing even that moment in her life.

"Don't you dare fuckin' say that, darlin'." He stomped up to her, his gaze broiling with heat and determination. "Can't explain it to ya no other way than sayin' that I feel as if I gotta help ya. You didn't come up on my land on accident. You was meant to come here and for me see ya. I feel that right down to my very bones."

His hands trembled minutely as they rose to cup her cheeks, his long, meaty fingers lacing at the back of her skull. She leaned her head back into his steady grip, feeling it anchoring her. Her stomach churned in a not-unpleasant way.

What in the name of God and Primus was going on?!

"Lemme come wit'cha. Please." His eyes darted back and forth between hers and though she could see only through her left eye now, she couldn't miss the way they seemed to brighten even in the relatively well-lit room.

Her head told her to say no. Everything that she knew to be intelligent and right screamed at her to lock down her resolve and leave now without him. Her very soul was crying out, however, demanding that she not dismiss Ryder. There was something else, something other-worldly going on here and deep down she felt that he was fated to be involved.

A gusty sigh poured from her lips and she closed her eyes. She didn't want to look at his face when she gave him her answer.

"As you wish. Welcome to the team, Ryder Erikson."

Relief should have been the last thing she felt at voicing those words, but she did feel it. It radiated off of her and she could feel it emanating in equal measure from the statuesque male before her.

She feared they would both live – otherwise die – to regret this.

 _XxXxX_

"So the bitch was using decoys." The seasoned CIA unit lead and operative snarled, keeping himself in check enough to refrain from hurtling papers from his desk.

"Yessir." A younger man stood to attention, his posture faultless. While the unit lead was more rotund and balding across most of his scalp, the younger agent boasted a full head of closely-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. He was also more lithe, a fair amount of muscle decorating his frame. Both wore suits tailored impeccably, the first's denoting more power, but lacking in the maneuverability afforded by the younger's 'sensible' attire.

"How much more does that weasel need for the project?" The elder, Harold Attinger, clenched his fists with irritation. Under normal circumstances he was a staid, unaffected man, That Witwicky girl drove him beyond his expansive limits of control. The she-devil wasn't even human. He was sure of it. It mattered not what the President or world leaders believed…that creature was a menace to their world that needed to be eliminated.

 _Cut off the head of the serpent, Attinger. Remove the head and the body will writhe and turn to dust_.

"Perhaps five more. That drone, the one Witwicky was activating, is already en-route to the lab." Savoy grimaced minutely. "It shames me that our men were so easily fooled."

"You are as dimwitted as they, James," Attinger barked, finally giving in to temptation and kicking over his chair.

"Temper, temper, Earth insect."

Both men froze as still as carved granite at the rumbled rebuke. The voice was disembodied, echoing from the speakers of Attinger's personal computer, but clear as though the wielder of the aforementioned voice were standing in the same room as them. If there was one being in the entirety of the cosmos that Attinger didn't want to get on the wrong side of, it was this one.

"I informed you that you were no closer to acquiring Optimus Prime than you had been to begin with. The key, you hairless insects, is the Primanar. Heed my words in truth. Cease your idiotic prancing about and retrieve her. Optimus Prime will come along with his brother. They will all come."

There was no indicator of the voice cutting out, but the atmosphere in the room lightened by tons. Both humans began to breathe more freely, neither wishing to admit to their understandable trepidation – nay, _fear_ – in the face of their rocky ally.

"I don't believe they have enough material amassed to do what we have planned," Savoy swallowed thickly, glancing over at his commanding officer. The elder man's jaw was taut, his unflappable demeanor shaken from the combination of their latest failed attempt and their ally's unannounced drop-in.

"It won't matter. Start making the calls." Attinger adjusted his suit, busying his hands to hide their shaking.

"We have a date with a certain woman long-overdue for the long sleep."


	2. Chapter Two: We Rise

**Chapter Two: We Rise  
**

Ryder was very slightly ashamed to admit that he'd underestimated the gravity of the situation.

Quite literally, in fact.

Instead of calling down the one known as Skywarp to retrieve them, Samantha had simply laced her arms around him impishly, winked, and told him to hold on tight. He hadn't had but a moment to gasp before the air around them crackled with energy. In the next instant there was a pop in his ears and all-encompassing darkness surrounded them.

 _Fuck it's cold!_ He thought to himself hysterically, his family jewels quaking upward seeking shelter from the brutal nothingness the blonde had sucked them into. No air, no light and no sound. She'd warned him of the absolute lack of everything before she'd grabbed herself to him, but he supposed it hadn't really sunk into his usually intelligent, quick-on-the-uptake brain that she'd meant to inaugurate him by means of first-travel.

There wasn't any time to worry about the lack of being in that black hole, he came to discover, because by the time he'd pulled himself into a second thought they were emerged.

The Primanar released him readily and quickly, acting as if she didn't wish to invade his space any more than she had in first snatching at him, but he wasn't so swift. His feet stumbled over flat ground as though he hadn't just been standing on the battered wooden floors of his homestead and he fell. The woman squealed as he tugged her down with him, his towering, wide body crashing into metal plating with a body-jarring _thump_.

Samantha oofed at the impact, her hands braced against his pectorals with her hips elevated. The minx, thank goodness, had been quick enough on the draw to keep her injury from ricocheting against his form.

She giggled adorably and he was angry with himself for thinking her tittering cute. She had to have known that the traspatial warp would have startled him. It rankled his nerves, but her airy delight soothed him better than any medicinal balm created.

"That was underhanded," he scolded, sitting himself up while summarily allowing her to straddle his thighs. He wasn't willing to relinquish his hold on her person for fear of her tripping him up again.

"I needed a good laugh," she replied without a hint of remorse.

Indeed she did.

Her eyes were brighter now. There was a wealth of mirth and contentment in them presently that he'd glimpsed very briefly under the morose surface. She had laugh lines at the edges of her inhuman eyes and upturned lips. She looked beautiful when she smiled.

During their earlier discussion she'd been sullen and bone-deep tired. She told him much while she gathered her strength on his couch. It was maddening to know that the person before him was nearly five-hundred years old. She barely looked to be in her thirties. She had lived long and been with the Cybertronians from the very beginning of their time on Earth. Well, the time of their reveal at any rate. She had known his ancestor, Hunter Mason. She was an inventor and a ruler, a glorious heart wrapped up into a tempting package that no longer aged as her human origins demanded.

She took little joy out of her life other than knowing that all she did was for the happiness of others.

Ryder's eyes goggled as the woman was plucked gently from his lap by a set of several snaking, metallic tentacles. He was hoisted onto his own two feet by a sturdy, singular limb.

"Put me down, Soundwave." The Primanar shrieked, smacking at the various appendages that poked at her with gentility. Ryder made to step forward, though he knew he had no hope of stopping the towering 'Con from hurting the woman if he deigned to do so, but the tentacle that had lifted before now restrained him.

"You have been injured." The stilted way in which the mech spoke made Ryder wince. _That_ was the voice every human imagined when they thought of the Transformers. Robotic and unfeeling. "The Primes have been informed of your condition. They will arrive momentarily."

"Oh goodie. I get to be yelled at."

"Would you but listen to sound advice, Precious One, you would not have to be reproved."

Sam offered the 'Con a rude gesture before verbally asking to be returned to the floor. When that didn't work, she began gesturing more avidly and violently. Despite himself and the situation, Ryder found himself chuckling. Though she had no human family remaining, the woman was far from alone in the universe.

"Who is the enlarged human?"

The gruffer voice of a 'Con identical but for his singular optic echoed across the cavernous room. Samantha had told him to expect to see Soundwave and his twin Shockwave at some point, but hadn't expected it so soon. He'd foolishly hoped he might be introduced to an Autobot first, one of the original Cybertronians that hadn't wanted to destroy and/or enslave the human race.

The earliest images of these two, some of the original footage taken after the Fall of Chicago, had shown them as two separate beings. They had looked drastically different from each other. Not so now. He knew that the Cybertronians took on bipedal forms that more adeptly translated into their alternate forms, but he hadn't quite expected the change to be so drastic. It was like looking at a before-and-after shot of someone who underwent major plastic surgery or suffered from a grave accident.

Shockwave glared down at him with his red optic. Ryder knew he was being sized up and found wanting. He could feel the alien's censure trickling across his skin.

"Don't be rude, Shockwave," Sam told off the towering mech, still gesturing for Soundwave to put her down. His ears might have been playing tricks on him, but he could have sworn he heard the Communications Officer release a put-off sigh as he returned the woman to his side. "This is Ryder."

"He is a descendant of Hunter Mason," Soundwave stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his brother, their unfaltering stares urging him to shuffle his feet with nervousness. He wasn't prone to doing such and repressed the impulse with effort. "Shockwave was not rude to the human. The male is enlarged."

"He is bigger than most, yes, but you don't verbalize peoples' physical differences like you just did. It is considered rude."

"Why is it rude? Explain." He had the impression of Shockwave waving his hand dismissively in the air before him even though his arms remained hanging innocently at his armored sides. "I did not call him by a foul moniker. He is enlarged in comparison to other humans. This is an observation of fact, not an untruth or exaggeration."

"I've explained this to you before, you jerk."

"You see, it is now you that is being rude, Precious One. Is it not inappropriate to address me as anything other than my designation? To do so in front of a stranger is also a slight against me."

Ryder was laughing uproariously at the pinched and heated look that veiled Samantha's face as she glared balefully up at the taunting automaton. When she took a single step forward he bellowed even louder at the two-step retreat Shockwave took behind his brother.

"I am glad to see that somebody is getting some enjoyment out of this."

Whatever humor he had had dried up in an instant at the booming voice that reverberated in the room they were in. The space, a main hub of both control centers and observational equipment, seemed to shrink considerably. There was a heaviness in the air again.

Two titanic-sized Cybertronians approached them fluidly. There had been others manning several of the stations nearby, but every single one of those beings rose onto their feet and saluted the newcomers.

Optimus Prime, with his signature blue and red paint, and Megatron Prime, his facial armor making him look like an armored boar of sorts. Megatron was taller than Optimus, but not by much. The two were absolutely massive in scale and radiated power like a second skin. A part of him wondered, if Samantha was their Primanar, why the others did not rise when they first appeared, but it was a distant query he'd expand on later.

As it was, he felt suspiciously like a castigated child again standing before his irate parents. He'd been a bit of a brawler and hell-raiser growing up so had perfected the recalcitrant stance of one under a condemning stare.

"Optimus, don't be mad."

"I am not mad, Sparkling. I am furious." The first Prime's optics glittered with an inward light from his peak of emotion. "I specifically ordered you to remain with the contingent of mechs that were assigned to your care. You disobeyed me and they in turn will be punished for allowing you to slip away from their monitoring systems."

"Don't punish them, Optimus. I ran off before they could have a prayer of catching me. If you're going to punish someone it should be me."

"Have no doubt, Pet, you will be held accountable for your actions," Megatron rumbled in a voice consistent with boulders crashing against each other down a mountainside. "You learn best, however, when you realize that there are others that suffer from your thoughtless actions. They also must learn that their responsibility to you is not to be taken lightly and is not as simplistic as they believed it would be."

Ryder hadn't known the woman for more than a couple of hours, if one discounted the dreams he had had of her and the feeling of kismet in regards to her, but he was well aware in such a short time that 'babysitting' her would be no easy task. Samantha was a headstrong female with a will of iron. Kind-hearted to those she cared about, yes, but there was mischief oozing from every pore of her body. She was what his mother had once termed a 'naughty-mouse'. She was silent as the grave and often squirreled her way in and out of situations without anyone else the wiser – until something went wrong that is.

How these beings could know her for hundreds of years and not see her impishness right off was beyond him.

"Amma'Am!" A young, boisterous voice cried out from beyond the wall of alien giants. The mechs didn't so much as twitch when a young girl, no more than four years of age, rushed up to the elder female. Samantha was ready for the catch when the youngster launched herself through the air in a clearly practiced move.

"Hello Nik. How's tricks?" Sam swung the girl up above her with complete ease, her arms not straining in the slightest. Ryder grinned wholeheartedly at the warmth that radiated off of his dream girl. She was meant to have children in her arms. It was in the way she held the child and herself. He'd been in the medical field long enough – not to mention from personal encounters with family and friends – to be able to read body language and to be able to discern who was a nurturer down to their very core.

"Amma'Am, I has your crown!" The girl waved a glittering circlet up and down between the two of them, her smile wider than seemed possible.

"I see that." Samantha chuckled. He was unable to see the dark look that passed over the optics of those present due to their lack of articulating facial features, but he felt the fine hairs at the back of his neck stand on end from it. Apparently something involving that bejeweled 'crown' was a big no-no for this group. "How about you put it back on my head? I thought it felt drafty up there!"

The girl, Nik, chittered away gaily as she reset the lavender-hued circlet onto Samatha's scalp. His brows shot up in surprise when the stones, Energon crystals if he assumed correctly, flared brilliantly upon contact with her person. The crystals near the back that dangled on glittering chains delved deeply into her tightly knotted braid as though they had a mind of their own. The teardrop crystal that rested against her forehead sparkled with nearly as much mirth as her eyes did.

"Thank you, baby girl. I don't know how I managed to lose it."

"Daddy says you in big trouble." Nik's eyes were dramatically wide. "Do you get a spankin' when you in trouble, too?"

Sam snickered, setting the child down onto her own two feet. The little girl's brown hair and hazel eyes popped nicely against the jade-green overalls she wore. She was urged back in the direction which she came from by the blonde's gentle pushing.

"No, I don't get spankings. I do, however, get grounded from time to time and that is just _no_ fun. How about you go back to your Daddy and tell him I'm here. I'm sure he'd like to _talk_ to me." It didn't take a genius to figure out that she was hinting at opening herself up for another round of scolding from whomever the girl's father was. The little one didn't need to hear that, however.

"Okay. Bye-bye!"

"Bye-bye to you too, baby girl."

Ryder was still grinning as he watched the girl toddle off to go find her father. He noted idly that the youngster had a relatively small in stature Autobot trailing after her. It seemed that every human had a babysitter in this place…wherever that was.

"Amma'Am?" He inquired, his right brow ticking up in question.

"I used to be Auntie, but by the third brood they started calling me Grandma. The youngest one at the time, Matthew, hadn't been able to work the sounds out well enough and I became Amma'Am instead of Grandma Sam. The name stuck."

"You don't mind bein' called Grandma?"

"Why would I?" She chuckled, shaking her head as Nik pirouetted around the corner and out of sight. "I'm certainly old enough to fit the bill even if I look like I'm perpetually trapped in a thirty-five year old's body."

"And the crown?" He raised a hand and allowed his fingers to skim across the crystals. They were warm to the touch. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the mechanoids stiffening.

 _Well if that ain't an oxymoron. Robots stiffening. I'll be a monkey's uncle._

"No big deal," she shrugged his question off, turning her focus onto the databanks around them. Her eyes were beginning to emit an ethereal glow.

"It is a 'big deal', Samantha, and you well know it." Optimus Prime's tone was immutably irate. Despite never having spoken to him before and having no reason to trust him, the red-and-blue Prime turned to speak directly to Ryder. "The crown as you call it links Samantha to every trace of Cybertron within this solar system including the Cybertronians. It allows her to feed off of its strength and to funnel it back in equal measure. It also aids in ensuring that the nanites within her systems retain a full charge. Without that connection, her nanites cannot keep up with the demand of keeping her human body rejuvenated."

"Are you sayin' that without the crown she'll age an' die?" Just speaking those words sent a heavy weight to the pit of his stomach. The urge to toss his cookies was strong. Irrationally, he felt anger directed towards the Primanar herself for ignoring her health in such a way.

Sam snorted derisively.

"He's being melodramatic. I ain't going to croak that easily." The blonde rolled her shoulder, the joints cracking as she did so. One hand fell to her injured side. "The nanites can do a lot for the human body, but they can't do everything all at once. Unless someone is able to extract every single one from my body, I won't age in the traditional sense of the word for a human for a long, _long_ time.

"The problem is that the nanites are always going to primarily focus on ridding my body of any foreign entities and correcting genetic errors, such as disease and aging. I can use them as conduits to do other things such as animating a protoform or warping, but that exhausts them and in turn exhausts me. Depending upon my actions I can end up in bed for days, even weeks at a time because I've worn myself out. Wearing the crown – as everyone likes to call it – gives me direct access to Cybertron's innate power core. Think of it like me plugging myself up to a charging station."

"She makes light a grave matter," Megatron rumbled in agitation. His laser-sharp focus landed on Ryder. "You will be joining us, human?"

"I will," he replied with as much surety as he could inject into the affirmation. He sidled up closer to the woman beside him, her body so much smaller than his own. He'd been raised with the mentality that it was a man's job to protect their woman. A woman could be all that she wanted to be, their inner strength insurmountable, and it was a man's physical strength that complimented her inner. It was an archaic and often long-forgotten – hell, frowned upon – way of thinking, but Ryder wholeheartedly believed that he was born for the sole reason of being the interlocking puzzle piece to his other half. His soul mate.

She was his dream girl, quite literally, and a niggling sense in the very recesses of his mind was telling him that Samantha was his matching piece.

His breathing hitched a little while his stomach flipped to think that just maybe he had found her.

"You will watch her." Megatron ordered him succinctly, his red optics blazing. "My Pet has an affinity of sneaking away from her security detail and neglecting her well-being. You are a doctor? All the better to ensure her health. She is able-bodied, but also soft of heart. She will go nowhere alone if it puts a weak human at risk."

"Hey!" They both chorused, affronted for their own separate reasons.

"I am far from weak," Ryder grumped, his not inconsiderable arms crossing tightly over his chest.

"Don't I have enough God-forsaken babysitters without adding another one into the mix? And for the last time, stop calling me 'Pet'! Stubborn fuckin' toaster oven!" Sam stomped her right foot onto the metal flooring, her eyes both brightening. A wave of static electricity seemed to dance over his skin and caused the finer hairs of his body to stand on end. For their parts, the titans twitched, but did not shy away.

"Obtuse hairless primate." Megatron parried back, mirth apparent in his tone despite no emotion showing on his face. The Cybertronians weren't like humans. Unless their facial structures were comprised of far more intricate little plates, they were unable to emote as a human did. He supposed that in itself might have been a reason for the human populace to be wary of them. They relied heavily on facial queues to read others and feel a sense of comfort. Their autonomous, alien planetmates didn't have the means to express in a way familiar to humankind.

"Come down here and say that you glitched out son-of-a-scrapper."

"I will not fall to your level, Pet. It is, after all, such a long way down."

"Why you…"

"You two are never going to completely get along, are you?" This new voice, a male's, chortled gaily. Ryder turned from the bickering duo to see a taller man, though a foot or so shorter than himself, striding purposely towards them. Nik was bouncing on his hip, her arms raised high as though she were flying in his arms.

"He was a pompous, self-righteous windbag before he was granted Primehood. Why did I ever think he'd be different now?" Sam gestured rudely at the silver Prime behind her back out of view of the giggling child.

"From what _you_ yourself have told me, 'Amma, he has changed and more than deserves his Prime status." The sandy-blonde haired newcomer cocked a nearly bushy eyebrow at the smaller woman once he'd come to stand a few feet away from them. "You're just cross because you don't like the endearment he is so very fond of laying at your feet."

"It ain't no endearment," she muttered nearly under her breath, shooting a death glare at the once Decepticon warlord. Finally she sighed, opening her arms and making grabby hands towards the tyke again. "Come to 'Amma, baby girl. You need to protect me when your daddy tries to pull my head from my shoulders."

The man pivoted his daughter away from the blonde, his expression stern even as Nik made mirroring hand motions towards the elder female.

"You aren't getting out of it that easy, Witwicky. Nik is here for me as a reminder to keep calm and as a reminder for _you_ that you have people who need you. Next time you go off with one of your hair-brained schemes, how about you think about all of the youngsters that won't understand why their Amma'Am isn't coming to visit anymore? Or maybe about the older ones that still need that matriarch in the family to look up to and guide them? Or even about the ones that you visit every weekend at the Home? You ever think about the rest of us having to explain to them why the woman who had been a part of their lives from day one and is always telling them stories from across the galaxies is no longer coming by for tea so they can hear about another fantastical adventure?"

For the first time in his life, Ryder felt a soul-numbing pain for another person's hurts. As soon as this young man, who looked no older than twenty-eight or so, started lecturing Samantha, she physically deflated. Her whole demeanor changed. Where before she had been regal with a hint of mischief, she now bore a countenance of one condemned. Her lavender-hued eyes misted with tears she fought to keep at bay.

As a doctor, it was ingrained in him to be sympathetic and often-times empathetic to the suffering of his patients. It grounded him and kept him from being aloof. There was a fine line between detachment and closeness a good physician needed to keep with his patients to treat them with the respect and accuracy they needed.

This was different.

Without thinking he snaked his hand around the fragile woman's middle and drew her carefully behind him. He held her positioned there, keeping her front tucked up to his back. She was so small and he so large that she would have completely disappeared from the smaller man's sight. His own body was tense, not liking the ire that spiked in the pit of his gut for the father's harshly spoken words.

"We haven't been introduced," he began fluently, his accent dropping to speak with the other man. He'd learned early-on in medical school that no one took him seriously with his country-boy twang and had worked diligently to suppress his accent. Whenever he'd been with patients or spoken with influential figures within the system, he kept his natural voice hidden. No matter how he spoke he was the same man, competent and downright lethal under the right circumstances, but his put-on voice was an intimidation factor.

"My name is Ryder Erikson." He offered his hand politely even if his first urge was to crush the man's fingers once their palms met. He restrained himself admirably. "I've recently come into the acquaintance of this little lady you were talking so mercilessly down to. I would ask respectfully that you _don't_ – _do_ – _it_ – _again_." With each word he punctuated with a more vigorous squeeze to the man's hand.

Said male winced.

"Justin Banes. Director of PR for Primaritus Central and General Relations throughout the tributaries." He shook his hand liberally once Ryder had released it. "Heck of a grip you got there, Mister Erikson."

"Ryder will do just fine." His lips thinned. "I reiterate, do not address Samantha so harshly again."

"Daddy! I want Amma'Am!" Nik squealed in her father's ear. Justin flinched at the cry. "Amma'Am is sad. Hugs make everyt'ing better."

"That they do," Sam wiggled out from behind him, her composure back in check. Ryder shivered minutely to feel her solicitous touch skim across the muscles of his back as she rounded him. She took Nik carefully from Justin, her movements tempered by her earlier ordeal. The little girl in turn laid her head on the blonde's shoulder, a contented smile etching across both of their faces.

He thought fleetingly once again that she was a natural-born mother.

"Is the tracker working?" The elder female queried, moving to perch herself onto a large, bowled chair set before a lone bank of consoles. As she sat, the chair pivoted and rolled back so that she and the little girl were slid into the deep recess of its lush cushioning. Nik tittered happily.

"Yes," a Cybertronian tech of some sort replied quickly, his servos hovering over the flat console before him. Fractures of light sparked from his fingers – _digits_ – and queued the computer. The robot version of tapping keys, apparently. A three-dimensional map projected from a space just beyond the mech's console. "Based on speed and predictive directional mapping, it is assumed that the protoform is being transported to Chicago."

"I'm kinda sick of Chicago," Sam hummed more to herself than to the rest of the room's occupants. Nik was laying back against the elder woman, their hands intertwined and playing with a long loop of string. Walking closer, Ryder could see that they were forming 'Jacob's Ladder'.

"I'd imagine that city wouldn't hold many fond memories," he conceded, marveling silently at the chair and the slowly revolving databanks that orbited said seat. The screens were entirely holographic and moved according to physical prompting, possibly even _mental_ urging, by Samantha herself. The largest jewel of her crown pulsed with light and heat. He felt power emanate from it.

He suspected that this chair, this _spot_ , was hers and hers alone.

"You'd be correct. We repaired all damages caused by the Horde and Vector Prime and the city itself has advanced lightyears beyond what it would have had Cybertron not encompassed Earth, but the memory of the destruction will haunt me for the rest of my life."

"Your primary existence was to create and nurture, Sweetspark." Optimus Prime rumbled from above. "Death and destruction is against your nature."

"Well, the human-condition warped the core of your precious Allspark."

"Don't be cross, Pet." Ryder couldn't be certain, but he sensed that Megatron would have kneeled and petted the woman had he not been so surrounded by others. He could feel the longing in the air. "You are as you were always meant to be. Truth, your sometimes bloodthirsty ways thrill my spark."

"You're a dirty mech, that's why."

"Language," Justin reminded them, eyeing his still playing daughter warily. Ryder chuckled to himself. He'd seen more than enough children spouting off words 'taught' to them by parents or other adults that hadn't minded their p's and q's.

"So why are you tracking these protoforms?" He queried, sneaking a glimpse at the nearby map and the moving red tag that denoted the protoform's location.

"We're trying to find their main base of operations. We've located a few of the off-site disassembling teams, but they're clever enough to keep their origins hidden. I've got a good guess, though, on who is funding Cemetery Wind."

"Who?"

"Joshua Joyce."

"You can't be serious, Sam?!" Justin remarked loudly to the elder woman. "He offers donations to many of our projects. Why would he be sided with Cemetery Wind?"

She signed. Deeply. "Justin, how many times have I told you that things are not always what meets the eye? Our projects and inventions are being funded and penned by me under a false identity. No matter how much digging he does, he's never going to come back to the source. He wants his finger in my various pots – you know how profitable most of my adventures have been – but if he knew exactly who I was he'd retract his financial backing. Swords would cross in a big way and he is no fool. Naïve, yes, but fool."

"But didn't K.S.I. work with the Neutrals in Antarctica when they were digging up that cyberformed landscape? I know Sparrowback is the division of K.S.I. that received Cybertronian aid. Isn't that a contradiction?" Ryder inquired softly, his hand itching to pet at her tightly braided hair. He wanted to pull those heavy strands from their knots and see if they were as soft as they looked.

He needed to get his shit together.

"It's all about appearances. Plus the excavation time was cut by nearly seventy-two years with the help of some of my mechs and femmes." Sam smiled crookedly. "That man is wily. He knows as much as anyone else that the Cybertronians report to their Primes and Primanar. He's accepted assistance, but doesn't allow for my mechs to access anything that might be considered classified information. Separate computer banks with no connective abilities for example."

Back and forth she worked with Nik's hands, creating one design after another. The little girl couldn't have been able to retain all the appropriate gestures to be able to recreate the finished string-art alone, but she was tickled pink to see how rapidly Sam was moving both their hands to make every design.

The fact that she could do so and not falter in either her thought processes or speech patterns was a bit of a fascination for him. Ryder had come to discover in his years of med-school and an intern that people were, as a rule, unable to multitask. Yes, people often preformed multiple tasks at the same time, but the brain does not allow one to give 100% to each task at the same time.

Samantha Witwicky was doing that now. Seemlessly.

What other tricks was she hiding?

"Hatchback reported that the foremen for the Antarctica site were instructed to scavenge some of the outer-most strips of cyberformed land and ship it back to K.S.I.. My theory is that they're using that metal, which is essentially the same raw materials needed to assemble a protoform, and harnessing it in the 'human' way. Depending upon its application, that metal isn't going to give Joshua what he wants I'm afraid."

The sound of screeching metal and clunking machinery caused all of their heads to turn. Megatron snarled as the latches above and neighboring his Spark chamber snicked open. Ryder's eyes widened to see the ornate, diamond shaped object that was the _Matrix of Leadership_ , coast down towards them.

"That Spark-Pitted thing simply refuses to be contained." Megatron beat at his reclosed chest plates loudly as though he were trying to dislodge a bit of food. "My brother, how could you tolerate it?"

"The Matrix was never as active as it has been these last decavorns. It was my hope that a different wielder would bare it better." Optimus looked only momentarily to his 'brother' before watching the Matrix hover above the two prone females.

"Don't touch, Nik," Sam ordered the young one, shifting enough to allow the girl to run off to her father and remove the distraction of the glowing alien device from her reach. The blonde's own hands hovered over the Matrix, humming lightly at whatever she felt.

"It's been gaining power since Earth and Cybertron melded. I can feel the Sparks waiting to be called forth."

"What?" Ryder leaned forward to hold his hand over the glowing tech as well. It exuded a large amount of heat and he could feel the air pulsing. It was like being stationed beside a large speaker and feeling the vibrations of sound emitting from it. "Sparks?"

"When a Cybertronian life is extinguished, it's similar in the way that it's believed humans have souls. On Cybertron there _is_ such a thing as reincarnation. Each soul, each Spark, recedes to the Well of All Sparks until it is called forth once more. Sometimes a Spark will return with the memories of its previous body. Other times it will not. It will be as a new being. A fresh start.

"Think of The Matrix of Leadership as a kind of biblical Pearly-Gate. The Matrix has a direct link to the Well and with the Allspark's power, a Spark can be pulled from the well and inserted into a protoform. Problem is that up until recently the Matrix has been dormant for that purpose. On an older Cybertron, a life was Sparked only once every six-hundred years or so from the Matrix and Allspark combined. It took all that time for the Matrix to reaccumulate the power necessary to open the 'gate' to allow a Spark through."

"Can I…can I touch it?" He was mesmerized by the object. Its heat was welcoming. It felt like _home_. Combined with the euphoria he was beginning to feel in Samantha's presence, the sense of her being his one and only, he was on the verge of being bowled right off his big feet.

"It usually burns," she warned him sternly.

"I'll take the risk." Without pausing he pushed his fingers into the pulsing metal. He received a shock, yes, but no sense of burning flesh. The shock was akin to a blast of static electricity which made his hair stand on end. A shuddered worked its way down his spine.

Pure bliss.

"Huh. Well I'll be damned," the woman murmured, her brows furrowed as she assessed him. She touched his fingers lightly where they connected with the Matrix. Out of the corner of his eyes he watched her eyes glow phenomenally. Sparks of red and blue streaked through the lavender iris.

"What in the world is going on here?!" Justin shouted over the ringing in his ears.

He wished he knew.


	3. Chapter Three: History Reawakening

**Chapter Three: History Reawakening**

"I had wondered who kept leaving fresh flowers."

Sam didn't turn, instead remained sitting on the intricately carved stone bench placed before the well-maintained grave.

 _Hunter Mason. Beloved husband, father, and friend_.

She'd placed an arrangement of gerbera daisies at the lower marker this visit. She tried to come to see him on the anniversary of his death every year. Some years she would get caught up in some tussle or another and wouldn't make it. That had happened this last year. A solar flare had caused a massive build-up of Energon along the outer boundaries of the Grid and it had taken a week for the crystals to be gathered before they could begin to do any damage to the Grid. Where once Cybertron suffered from a lack of usable energy, having been siphoned of aw Energon until all that was left was hollow, barren wells, it now boasted nearly too much energy to safely use.

The two worlds truly did have a symbiotic relationship now. The addition of a more advanced society and the protection it provided kept the human race from annihilating itself or unwittingly killing its planet of origin. Cybertron itself was rewarded with a thriving, seemingly perfect Sun to help it generate Energon. Too strong a Sun and Energon turns black and reacts negatively to all stimuli. Too weak and energy does not form fully.

"Great-Gram used tah tell stories 'bout some of our ancestors. Grandad Hunter was said tah have loved someone 'fore he married off. Great-Gram said the other woman chased him off. If she hadn't, none of us woulda been alive." Ryder was silent for a beat. "That was you, wasn't it? The other woman?"

"There's a lot of whimsy in old family stories, but I'm afraid that one is true." Samantha rubbed her hands over the tops of her thighs slowly and methodically. Her chest constricted. "I loved Hunter Mason – and he loved me. Deep down I still _do_ love him. There was a bit of kismet between us." A rueful smile slipped across her face. "I never thought I'd be like those pathetic, sad little women from all those stories when I was younger. Falling in love with a man I couldn't have.

"Those were the days, though, when aliens didn't exist. Not literally, of course, but those were the age-old times when humans believed they were alone in the universe. Little girls could fantasize about knights in shining armor and little boys could be football-doctor-astronauts when they grew up!"

"What was that like?" Ryder sat beside her on the bench, his massive body emitting a comforting warmth into her cooled skin. He shrugged off the sheepskin jacket he'd been wearing without prompting and methodically eased her arms through the arm holes. The covering absolutely swallowed her. It smelled like him, too. That same woodsy, after-rain smell that Hunter had carried on him. Something else, though, akin to freshly chopped cedar. "What was it like growin' up as a kid then? I ain't known nothin' 'sides havin' the Transformers on Earth wit' us."

"It was mostly the same as it is now from what I can tell. I've been around generations of kids from the very first allies we'd made so it's not like I'm out of touch with today's people." She hunkered further into the jacket, loving the weight of it all around her. Her eyes were only semi-focused on the grave marker before them. "It was more dated. There was far less emphasis on technology for recreational purposes. Subject matter was of course different in school. Real books and kinda dumbed-down from what kids learn today. Now it's also mandatory for the upper-level Primary School students to learn about the beings we share Earth with.

"All my 'grandkids' are for the most part as active as I ever was. The adults that work with me and the Cybertronians make sure their children have active, positive contact with the mechs and femmes. They have their own human friends and extracurricular activities outside of their interactions with the Cybertronians, however. They're well-rounded. One of the teenage ones is named Marisol. She saw some viral videos of me when I was younger after doing a 'study' for school. I used to dance, you see. She's gotten it into her head that she wants to become a Prima Ballerina and her poor parents are being dragged along for that ride like any other couple would."

"You don' have a huge role in all their lives, do ya? Back on Primaritus, Jason revealed 'nough for me tah see tha' his family at least yer keepin' track of. Dependin' on the number of children, you'd be lookin' at a tall order tah watch out for 'em all."

"I'm not active in all their lives, no, but I know them all." She was back to rubbing her thighs. A nervous habit she'd picked up in recent years. "The matriarchs and patriarchs of each of the branching families knows that I am there if they ever have need of me. Justin's grand-aunt, his grandmother's full-sister, wished not to involve her family beyond the necessary with me or the Cybertronians. I respect hers and their wishes. However, I do keep an eye on the lines and make sure that should they ever have a need, I am there."

"How many are there? Descendants I mean. How many families are you keepin' an eye on?"

"The first of them started from the surnames of Banes, Michael and Shelby making me godmother of all of their children, Lennox, Epps, …and Mason." At his widened eyes she smiled softly. "You didn't think you came by that Synth of yours by sheer coincidence, did you Ryder? No, I haven't personally interacted with any of your family since my Hunter, but I promised myself that I would do everything to ensure that his legacy would live through his children and their children. When I discovered the failure of your heart I immediately set out to have one of my Synths issued directly to you.

"As for how many of the broods are still alive to this day? There are thirty-nine descendants of the original Banes family, sixteen from Lennox, and Epps holds a whopping eighty-two. Epps had had five children of his own and each of those rugrats had had their own three to four children each. Some generations are smaller and others larger. Some of the descendants only have one child. A few have had none. I keep an eye on them all." She smirked. "Keep in mind that about a third of these numbers, at present, wish to have nothing to do with me. That is perfectly fine and within their rights. I will not abandon them, however."

"Ya'ever think that maybe ya got too much tah worry 'bout? D'ya ever take time tah step back and let things jus' happen?" He hesitated for only the briefest moment before reaching over and wrapping his arm around her waist to tug her into his side. A shuddering sigh fell from her lips as he did so.

Puzzle pieces. They felt like two perfectly matched puzzle pieces.

"'Y'okay?" A kiss to her temple.

"The only times I've really been able to just kick back is when I've overtaxed this body. In those cases it's been more or less forced bedrest." A wry grin tickled at her. "You'd be amazed at how much of a hardass even the meekest of Cybertronians can be under the right circumstances."

"Can't say as I blame them, sweetheart. Even pushin' off the whole fact that yer their Primanar, yer special tah them in yer own way. I don' think if that power left ya high an' dry that any of 'em would be able tah abandon ya." He chuckled. "Nevah thought I'd see Megatron, baddest of the bad himself, pokin' fun at a human."

"It's a special kind of bond," she demurred, finally looking away from Hunter's grave. Tears had begun to well in her eyes again.

"Hey, it's okay."

"Everyone is raised with hearing how unfair life is. Those first handful of years of my life I thought life was actually pretty okay. There were some rough patches, yeah, but everyone is bound to trip up sometime, someway. After Mission City, though, I started to learn the truth. My body was changing and adapting. The Allspark couldn't exist within a decaying host. It couldn't be held back by a weak, organic body. In a matter of years I had gone from being a plain ole human girl, to the Allspark's host, to the Allspark itself.

"I don't age anymore. I almost _never_ get sick. I am susceptible to physical pain and destruction from an outside source, but I will never again live life as a human. If I were to take a husband I'd only be able to extend his life by several hundred years with the technology we have, but in the grand scheme of things what is three or four hundred years? I'm looking down the barrel end of an eternity and it's horrifying some days.

"And children of my own? I couldn't bear it! The families I've taken to looking after is as close as I will ever get to having my own biological family. It tears me apart inside to watch them all grow up so fast and then die. I remember getting to hold most of them almost as soon as they were born…and it seems like in a blink of an eye I'm visiting them in the rest centers or Homes, their bodies having exhausted after eighty years or so.

"That's what happened with Hunter. My Hunter." Her heart panged. "I knew he was mine from the start. And I was his. It just couldn't be, though. Not with our lives as separated as they were. He deserved to have everything that life could give him. A wife and children. Grandchildren. Hell, I know he was around for a handful of his great-grandkids! I would have never been able to give him any of that. Not a family and not even my time. Not so early into Cybertron melding with Earth."

"Y'know, Sam, tha' you deserve happiness, too."

"We don't always get to choose how our lives are going to play out, Ryder." A sardonic smile touched across her face and she nudged his sturdy side. "We can, however, do what we can to make other peoples' lives better in the meantime."

They stayed there for another half an hour, both of them quiet and in their own thoughts. Samantha basked in the presence of another person after so long. Of course she had all of the 'children' of her surrogate families, but even the ones that actively worked with the still intact N.E.S.T. she kept a certain distance from. Each death hurt her when their times came, but the last human she'd allowed herself to truly connect with had been Mike and Shelby's children. When she had lost them to old age, she'd mourned for years.

She'd never allowed herself to grow too close to any human again. The pain was too great.

As soon as she'd looked up into Ryder's face she'd been a goner. Hunter. She still saw Hunter when she looked at him and that was wrong of her. Ryder was of his blood, yes, but he was not him. She felt the same connection with him, however, as she had with Hunter. He'd delved down into her very core without every trying. His touch against hers in the pond when she'd been at risk of drowning had been enough. An awareness of him was immediate and unshakeable.

That sense of kismet was the same. It was familiar and warm. It had the feeling of _home_. Rightness. The word 'mine' revolved around her head in an endless loop, but she dared not voice the possession aloud.

Too many times life had proven to her that she owned nothing in this world.

"We have to get going," she muttered after a time, rising up onto tired feet. Ratchet and Flatline would be displeased with her at her next exam. It had been mandated by the medics that every month she would take three days of rest where she did nothing to expend Allspark energy. On those days she was often pampered to within an inch of her life and indulged in lengthy naps at the Temple of Simphur.

Due to multiple crisis, she'd not had an exam for four months and had been using far more Allspark energy than she really should have been.

Ryder stood beside her. At his great height she was eye-level to his sternum. Lower sternum specifically. It was almost impossible for her to believe that he was a doctor with his size, both in height and girth. Still, he'd been training to be a surgeon of the heart instead of just a 'simple' practitioner. That required a certain amount of dexterity that his hands should not have possessed. Yet he was proficient at what he did. There was no discrediting both his intelligence in the field, his degrees, and the application of the stitches he'd given to her.

"I still don' think we should be doin' this so soon. You can't be recovered nearly 'nough for espionage work!" His hand, seemingly of its own volition, reached outward and down to cup gingerly over her mending side. His ice-blue eyes spoke of worry for her.

"It's fine. In another couple of days I'll be all healed up. I'll be healed too quickly for the stitches to dissolve on their own." The lifted brow he shot at her had her chuckling good-naturedly. "Oh come now, did you really think I'd heal like everybody else? I got some serious mojo going on."

"Show me." It was an order, not a request. A curious giddiness tickled up and down her spine to hear that unshakeable demand in his voice. When was the last time she'd ever heard someone – _and listened_ – command her to do anything so staunchly?

Emitting a put-off sigh, the blonde lifted her grey blouse enough to reveal her injured side. It had been a day since the injury had happened and Ryder had been abruptly inaugurated into the chaotic life as a N.E.S.T. employee/operative. Of course it was by her word alone that he was a part of the team. Paperwork, especially of the human variety, was still enough of a pain in her ass that she avoided it at all costs.

Ryder crouched to get a better look at the wound. His lips were pinched into a fine line and concentration was written across his handsome face. His large fingers danced across the stitched skin.

"Amazing," he murmured, verbally admiring the healing. His accent, for the first time in her singular presence, disappeared. "No swelling. No redness. This wound looks weeks old now instead of only a single day. I could, most likely, safely remove these sutures today at the rate that your body has healed. Tell me, is this the sort of healing your medinats would be able to mimic? I know that the medinats were disallowed across the globe along with your Synths, but this kind of repair is miraculous. The opportunity for a world without pain, without disease is right there at our fingertips!"

Sam rolled her shirt back down, blocking off his sight of the healing skin. She shook her head slowly to his inquiry.

"No, the medinats can't repair to this degree. Don't mistake me, if we can get Earth's born species to accept the medinats, humans can cut out a lot of suffering. The 'nats can destroy common airborne and bloodborne pathogens such as the flu or even STDs. Over time they have been shown to terminate cancer cells, but that is only if the cancer is not in a highly-advanced state. They can also boost natural healing by about twenty percent.

"My own healing is thanks to ancient Cybertronian nanites in my blood and a combined biological-cybernetic connection to the primary source of power for the Cybertronian race. If I ever have a more severe wound such a broken bone, other developed techs improve my rate of healing since even my nanites have a limit to what they can do within any given time frame and without outside assistance."

"Still incredible." Ryder shook himself of his wonder visibly and cleared out his throat. An endearing blush bloomed on his sculpted cheeks as he seemed to realize that he was still crouched in front of her with his hands bracketing her hips. "Pardon."

"No worries," she giggled, unable to resist rubbing the back of a finger against his rosy cheek as he lifted back to his full height.

"As touching as this is, children, we have a schedule to keep." Sam gritted her teeth, glaring balefully up at the ex-Decepticon warlord. The titan had made it his primary mission since the previous day's 'excitement' to piss her off. No, that wasn't wholly truthful. It was also unkind of her. He was simply taking an active role in guarding her which either of the Primes tended to do from time to time.

He just so happened to be the Prime that grated on her nerves the most.

"I don' know how ya big brutes manage to skulk around so quiet-like. S'kinda unnervin'." Ryder crossed his arms in front of him in that stubborn way the male of every species tended towards. It was like a woman posing with her hands on her hips. Some gestures seemed ingrained in one's DNA.

"I do not _skulk_ , insect." Megatron growled, latches and gears grinding across his torso and forearms in agitation. "You will discover that my superior frame allows me to move swiftly and silently through your atmosphere. I was blessed by the eye of Primus when I was created."

"Cockiness is not an attractive quality, Megsy." She rolled her eyes heavenward, praying for patience. Had she not had a bond with him and felt his genuine caring for her down to the core of his Spark, she'd have shot a few grenades right up his aft. He was full of himself enough that a few more explosive accessories wouldn't have made much of a difference.

"Do not lie to yourself, Pet." He was purring at her now. "You quite enjoy it when I hold you in my servos and allow you to press your face against my chest plates. I am superior for your purposes."

A smirk teased its way across her face. "Well of course there is that. You're like a big ole kitten, purring when I give you a little scratch under the chin. Oh mighty warlord…not hardly anymore. Just a fleshbag's teddy bear now.

"Cease that blather, Sparkling." A true mixture of irritation and ire zinged across the line between them. While the two warring factions had essentially been disbanded and over four-hundred years separated the 'Bots and 'Cons from that fateful day in Chicago, there was still a rift between the two mind-sets. That, she feared, would never be entirely overcome.

At their cores, Autobots and Decepticons were the same. All were made by their Creators and designed for the same purposed. Hundreds of millions of years had evolved them and separate groups had developed different ideals and ways to achieve their ends. Even the Neutrals, who had painstakingly avoided all contact with either faction for fear of destruction or assimilation, distanced themselves from the two combatants and each other. Their factions served as the Cybertronian version of ethnicity or religious beliefs.

Idly she wondered at how long it would take mankind to realize that they were all human despite how they looked or what they believed in when this alien race still fought like cats and dogs.

Maybe she _would_ grow to be an old lady by the time they worked out all their differences.

"You are not a puny fleshbag, _my_ Pet. You are far above the race you call your own." Megatron growled, bringing her back from her wandering thoughts. "And I am not one of those sharp-toothed little vermin you dare to call a pet. I am Lord Megatron, anointed Prime of the Allspark and High Protector. I do not lower myself to such levels as purring for your amusement."

"You purr," she retorted without feeling, turning back to Ryder. The human male was cheerfully watching their banter as though it were a rousing game of badminton. "He purrs."

"I do not…" A static whine escaping from the titan's vocalizer had both native Earthlings wincing. "Slag-sucking ornament!"

The Matrix of Leadership was more or less catapulted out of Megatron's chassis-hold. Before the plates snicked shut, Sam caught a glimpse of sparking wires and obvious burn residue. Red optics glared balefully at the innocently floating Matrix.

"I don' think the Matrix likes ya, Megatron," Ryder raised both brows fractionally, eyeing the powerful relic as it unerringly drifted into the blonde's opened palms. His head tilted. "Why ya think it's actin' funny. Ya said it was weird that I could touch it yesterday before ya hurried me away from Justin."

"It normally burns other humans. A regular person's soft tissues almost instantly blister once they come into contact with the particular radiation that the Matrix gives off. It's nothing that causes cancer, but it's dangerous just the same to any human wishing to touch it." Sam hummed lightly, inwardly relishing in the oneness of the Allspark's power brushing against the Matrix's. They were two complimentary power sources. "Until you."

Thinking on it, glancing briefly up at the still simmering silver tyrant, Sam closed her eyes. Allspark power flowed down through her hands and into the Matrix. The Matrix released a rhythmic humming sound as she urged it to change shape and shrink. A single spire of its frame fissured out and coiled back towards itself. In mere moments the Matrix was as it had always been, only smaller and hanging from a 'chain' made of its own parts.

Samantha held it up towards Ryder's neck.

"Let me secure this to you, please." Without questioning her, Ryder knelt down so that she wouldn't have to reach so high up to lock the clasp to the back of his neck. On his knees, he was closer to her height. His hands settled on her hips and his nose dipped forward, close to her throat. She could hear him inhaling her scent greedily.

"The Matrix was made from a kernel of the Allspark's power core," she began by way of brushing off the sudden flip-flopping of her stomach and fluttering of her heart. "They're connected, but they're also separate. The Matrix is always drawn to me because of me fusing with their Allspark. It senses its Mother-power.

"It is a tool designed to be used by the Primes without siphoning off of the Allspark itself. When their world was much younger, the Allspark was confined to one place. The Allspark fractured a piece of itself off so that Cybertron's children could have use of its great power when the Allspark itself couldn't be elsewhere. In time the Matrix evolved to perform its own feats of splendor.

"The Matrix will protect you." The Primanar breathed deeply, relishing in the scent of him while she girded herself. The Matrix pulsed against her fingertips. Judging by the way his body shuddered, Ryder felt its power thrumming against his own copper skin. "I don't know what it will allow you to do with it – or even if it can be wielded by a human – but it is a formidable power. It will not allow itself to be damaged. If you wear this, it will protect you by protecting itself."

"Why don't you wear it, then?" His eyes were solemn. " _You_ can get hurt. I s'pect it's cuz your human body an' the Allspark have tah work together. For lack of a better term, the Allspark is handicapped by yer fragile and limited form."

"Insect, do not…"

"No, Megatron." Sam snapped in the glaring red-optics of her newest Prime. "He's right. He's simply speaking what no one else wants to hear despite my having toted on about it since the beginning."

She turned back to Ryder, who still kneeled before her. "You're right. I'm hampered by the limitations of my human body. The nanites and my connection to the Allspark, though, give me a sort of sixth sense. I have an expanded awareness. Even 'hindered' as I am by being human, I'm better equipped to protect myself than you are. So, will you wear the Matrix for me? Keep it safe and let it keep you safe?"

Ryder came to his feet again, his gaze assessing as it shifted over her. His jaw was firmed, showing her that he was taking her seriously. After a drawn-out breath, he tucked the lipstick-sized Matrix under the crew-cut of his black t-shirt.

"So long as I'm goin' wit' ya, I don' care what ya collar me with." His eyes blazed. "I'll be watchin' ya, woman."

"Wouldn't have it any other way."

:: As tender as this moment is, we are on a demanding schedule. :: The repeated sentiment resounded in her inner-ear. She turned to glare up at the inwardly smirking fiend.

:: You're a righteous pain in my ass. :: Using the comm-lines was infinitely easier now than it ever had been. Where once her brain felt like it was being fried between two live-wires when she used the internal communication system the Cybertronian race relied on so heavily, she now only ever got a headache if she were trying to reach past her 'range'. She could communicate with any of her Bonds across the world and even outward to some of the flotillas coasting between Earth and her moon, but the occasional straggler to arrive in their solar system as a whole got her only pain when she tried to connect.

She'd stopped trying to reach the stray soldiers and civilian Cybertronians that still answered to any one of the 'blasts' sent out into the universe, calling for them to come home. If they wished to reconnect with the reformed Cybertron and the Allspark, they had to seek her out and come planetside.

She had a niggling feeling in the back of her mind that something bad was going to happen soon. There was a build-up that had been decades in the making. Despite being unable to communicate with a Cybertronian that wasn't close enough, she still had a sense of when they came nearer to the borders of her awareness.

There was one, a dark smudge of an unfulfilled Bond, which skirted her reach. Whoever it was was meticulous in keeping her at bay. She didn't like it. The last time any being had shut her out thus had been Vector Prime.

Scouts, at her command, searched diligently for the culprit, but they never could find the mech or femme.

"Come along, children. It is time to leave." Megatron folded down into his alternate mode. Sam shook her head slowly at the form he'd been so keen on keeping for the last three-hundred years or so.

"I told you, Megatron, either full-Cybertronian design or full-Earthen design. This shape doesn't fit in under any circumstances!" She led the way to the open cockpit of Megatron's alt. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Ryder admiring the sleek, black shape he'd assumed. A Nighthawk interbred with a Cybertronian fighter-ship. "I miss your beat up old Mack alt."

"That is because I resembled my brother more in that guise. I am not a Grounder, Pet. I was meant to fly the skies." A chuckle reverberated through his frame as she climbed up over his spiked wings with practiced ease. Ryder had reached out to assist her, gentleman that he was, but saw fairly quickly that she knew what she was doing. "You were meant to fly with me, too, little one. You find comfort in it. How often is it that I must wake you because you have fallen asleep while we drift through the clouds together?"

"That's because I'm tired. You know I'm exhausted quickly."

"As you say, Pet." He was snickering now. "As you say."

As punishment, Sam kicked at the foreign-to-mankind paneling in the forward most cockpit. Ryder assessed her as he too rose up to her level on Megatron's frame. His brows furrowed and eyes narrowed until the nine-point harness worked its way around and over her. Tension left his face at seeing her so securely fastened. His own seat, she knew, would only be a five-point.

:: The male's pheromones amplify whenever he is in your presence, Pet. :: Sam allowed herself to relax into the ultra-cushioned seat as Ryder settled himself into his own spot behind her and in a separate compartment. :: He would make a good mate for you. He is able-bodied and intelligent. You would produce fit and worthy offspring with this male. ::

:: Are you trying to play matchmaker, Megatron? Really, if my mother couldn't con grandchildren out of me and none of the kids have been able to convince me thus far, what makes you think that sticking your nose into my love-life is going to alter my mind? ::

The shaded canopy slid over them with a nearly silent hiss. The ex-Warlord had no need of a runway or clear surface. He merely propelled them into a hovering position over the ground via thrusters under his hull before launching them off at incredible speeds which reached Mach quickly.

She was glad she'd warned Ryder about the sheer and sudden acceleration beforehand. It would have been disorienting otherwise.

:: You have refrained from relieving yourself with another human for a vorn now, Samantha. Flatline has told me that sexual frustration can be endangering to humans. Should you not wish to take this Ryder as a mate, it would be beneficial to take him to your berth. From what my sensors tell me, he would not be unwilling. ::

"Oh my God," she groaned out loud, scrubbing her hands up and down across her face. Despite the other human being unlikely to hear her vocalizations between their cabins without Megatron engaging a low-level communication-array, she preferred not to have this conversation out loud. She told him as much. :: Please, stop! I feel like I'm a little kid again having the 'birds and the bees' talk with my parents! Worse, I feel like I did when Shelby took me aside to tell me I needed to get laid because I was being a cranky bitch. ::

:: She was right. The endorphins that released into your bloodstream when you took that male to your berth a few nights later calmed you considerably. Be aware, Pet, that the medics are forming a roster of males for you to choose from when you have need. They have been able to accurately choose those with the most desirable attributes which you have shown favor with in the past. ::

:: They set me up with a fucking harem?! :: She was all but screeching in her mind, her heart thudding and her stomach sinking. Her normally stringent grasp on her emotions and how they dispersed through the Bonds slipped momentarily. For that single slip, she was bombarded with inquiring comms and soothing entreaties, promises that everything would be better if they had the power to make it so.

She groaned.

:: Not a harem, Primanar. They were vetted for the best possible matches. You would not have to see them other than when you wished for relief. They each have their own lives and are successful in their varying fields. Your paths would not have to cross outside of your berth. ::

:: I am _so_ done with this conversation. _Done_ , do you hear me?! :: Silently, she was making a mental note to have a chit-chat with the two chief medics of the former factions. Who she did or did not take to her berth – ehr, bed – was her own damned business!

:: Pet, I am sure that Ryder would… ::

:: _DONE_ , Megatron. :: She stuck her fingers in her ears and twittered as a physical and immature show that she was indeed finished with this awkward conversation.

A teeny-tiny part of her, the slutty she-thing that lived in the proverbial closet of her darkest fantasies, whispered suggestively that they would certainly have some fun with the country-boy doctor. Maybe they could even _play_ doctor. He'd be her doctor and she'd be his patient. His obedient little patient, ready to follow doctor's orders.

 _Ugh. Maybe I do need to get laid. But has it really been that long?_

She was no four-hundred year old virgin. It had been embarrassing enough to realize that she'd been at the ripe 'old' age of thirty-seven, though she only looked physically in her twenties, when Shelby had tugged her back inside at one of the infamous Banes' family picnics to tell her that she was still a wanting woman. The Allspark didn't kill her humanity or her human needs when she melded with it. She'd been especially crabby that day and Mike's wife had out-and-out asked her if she'd ever been with a man before.

No, as it turned out to her own surprise, she hadn't.

Three nights later she'd been brooding over her lot in life and her virgin status at a popular club in Sydney Australia. It's all she'd been able to think about since Shelby had put it in her head. She was undeniably short-tempered when she wasn't around the children of the first-families and nobody could stand to be around her for prolonged periods of time. Well, no one but the Cybertronians. They logically understood the sexual frustration she suffered from, the human species not being the first organic race they'd come across in their long lives, but they couldn't sympathize or empathize with it since they themselves felt nothing of the sort for their own kind.

They found her spitting fire entertaining.

That had been when Wren Hedgecomb had meandered into her line of sight. The man was walking sin and as soon as he'd seen her he'd been entranced. She could see it in his eyes. There was heat in his gaze when he looked her up and down, only briefly wincing at the severe scarring of her face. That was a bonus to her. Many a man had walked away from her from seeing the horrific white lines that blinded her on one side and kept herself from being able to smile with both sides of her lips naturally.

It hadn't taken more than another shot of tequila and a come-hither look from her for them to find their way back to her rented suite at a local hotel. Wren hadn't seemed to care that she'd been a virgin and she hadn't cared past that first shaft of dazzling pain when her hymen had broken. She'd been an avid participant and with a little 'help' from the Allspark, Wren had been as randy as a teenager again. Strategic bursts of electrical impulses and a few naughty teases kept them at it until neither of them could move for over four hours. It was over two days later when she allowed him to leave her room.

There had been others like Wren in the last several hundred years. Some were like boomerangs, zinging back to her hand almost on command. Others were just proverbial passing ships in the night. For as old as she was, she didn't think she'd had more than a dozen lovers.

Thinking on it – _hard_ – she realized that Megatron was right. It was creepy that he knew when she had sex last and she didn't, at least not immediately, but she hadn't had a partner for close to a hundred years now!

 _Fuck. What am I? A camel? That's a long time to go without a bit of man to whet my whistle._

No matter how long it had been, though, she wouldn't be letting the two slap-happy medics set up a team for her. Just what she need, a line-up of men waiting for a homerun at the batting cages! Sometimes she wished that the alien automatons weren't so logic-driven. Most of the time it was a comfort to her, but them just not grasping the concept of appropriateness tended to drive her up the wall.

"How long did'ya say this flight was gonna be?" Ryder's voice carried to her through the opened comm. She gave a genuine smile to see a 2-D holographic rendering of the man flash into existence beside her. She could tell quite easily from the sparkle in his eyes that he was enjoying this aerial trip.

The speed was exhilarating.

"Not long enough for the stewardess to start the in-flight movie." She whooped gaily as Megatron barrel-rolled them in retaliation. The bite of aggression was lost on both humans. Had he truly been angered, had he been the evil being he'd been in Mission City centuries ago, he'd have unlatched their harnesses so that their bodies knocked around their cockpits painfully. Instead, she felt her harness snug-down a bit more before the roll.

Her fellow human cheered his own excitement.

"Do it again!" They hollered together, hooting when the Prime obliged.

XxXxX

Sam felt like a little girl again waving off her father to work as she and the doctor were left off outside of Chicago. She heard the big man chuckling at her antics, but she couldn't help herself as she bounced on her feet and lashed her arm from side to side.

"Can't say as I've ever been shuttled quite like that before," Ryder shook his head on a deep snort.

"Whatcha like better? Flyin' or warps? Personally, I'll go flying any day of the week." Her cheeks hurt she was grinning so hard. Flying with any of the Seekers or other Flyers, Megatron especially, always left her giddy.

"Don' tell the bastard I said so, but that trip was a whirlwind. I'm ready for round two."

The sound of grumbling engines brought a thrill back into her chest. She whirled on still-graceful feet to face the oncoming vehicles. Megatron had deposited them on the outskirts of the city at a ramshackle sub-shop that looked as though it hadn't seen business in years. A lot of outlying property of Chicago was like that now. The city itself thrived, but it was centered in a 'dead-zone'.

"They don' do nothin' by halves, do they?"

"Not a chance," she smirked, squinting in the light of day to see the four vehicles growing ever-closer. She knew what he saw. She'd been bowled over the first time, too. Car enthusiasts was too tame a word for the 'Transformers'. Only a handful of them, Autobot, Decepticon, or Neutral alike, chose more sedate alts. Most subscribed to the same standard as the new arrivals.

In the lead was a formidable, battle-scarred Oshkosh Medium Defense Tactical vehicle. That mech was a gunner through and through. Next to Ironhide, Hound was the greatest weapons specialist of any faction. He was a beast. Rotund for an Autobot, but able. A now-ancient child's movie called 'The Guardians' had a character that reminded her of him. An especially jolly, but badass Santa. In his bipedal form he even had the beard to go with the image.

He had a penchant for 'smoking' those damned mufflers, though, and she was trying to get him to quit the accursed things.

Following after him was the ever-prolific Drift. Drift was, in essence, a samurai come to life. His primary weapons were varying swords, one of which resembling a katana a great deal. He used projectile weapons of course, but hand-to-hand combat was his specialty. He was a trainer of the highest caliber. When she'd first Bonded with him and shared his memories, she'd seen that new soldiers to the Autobot cause respected him, but also feared his tutelage. Drift couldn't abide slackers. His alt was a sexy blue Bugatti Veyron Vitesse. Even in this day and age that car was a classic beauty.

Crosshairs was pulling up near the rear. Sam winced at seeing him. She'd felt him, of course, and knew he was usually paired up with this particular squad, but she really had a hard time liking him. He was an Autobot, but he was a turncoat little shit. He also tended towards being a major ass-kisser when it came to her. He was loyal to Optimus, yes, but she had seen his memories. She knew he'd hike his metal aft out of a hairy situation if the chances didn't look good. His green Corvette Stingray alt was one of the latest models, unlike Sideswipe's had been before he'd matched his twin to resemble a Lamborghini.

The last member of the group set her feet back to bouncing.

"Hey, is that…?"

"My Guardian, Bumblebee!" She was cheering and running towards the incoming quad now. She didn't even flinch as the other three screeched past her, their brakes checking hard. 'Bee transformed around her, his servos opening only to close around her securely. She hummed with contentment as she was brought up to his chassis and cuddled up against the protective plating of his Spark chamber.

His radio crackled to life and a sweet serenade floated in the air around them.

 _From your hair down to your toes,_

 _You're not much, goodness knows._

 _But, you're so precious to me,_

 _Sweet as can be, baby of mine._

"Oh, for Primus' sake, 'Bee!" Crosshairs grumbled, crossing his arms over his chassis in irritation. "It ain't been that long since you've seen her."

"Six years," she retorted into the scout's chest plates. They were blackened now. He'd altered his terrestrial disguise. He was an older model Camaro now. She loved him no matter what, but she just didn't like the 'muscle' look to him. She preferred shine and sleek over flat-black bulk to her Guardian any day of the week.

"Have a Spark, Crosshairs," Drift scolded his comrade as he eased up beside Bumblebee to coast a digit down over her back. They both sighed in peace at the contact. It never failed. No matter which mech or femme it was, physical contact with any of her Bonds made everything right with the world. "She is still human at her core. Her years are not seen the same as we see them."

Crosshairs gruffed, but she could read the longing through their line. With a put-off huff of air she turned in Bumblebee's grip and opened her arms to the green mech, making 'gimme' hands. His faceplates were a little more intricate so she could physically see him beam at her.

Without a second to blink she was transferred from the Scout to the Saboteur. His 'trench coat' clinked as he whirled away from the others. He always liked to have private moments with her. He had an image to maintain. It was a piss-poor image, but he still kept at it.

:: I've missed you, Sweetspark. :: It was a heartfelt murmur through their own private comm and, unbidden, it softened her heart. It always did.

:: Missed you, too, you traitorous afthat. ::

"We've been surveying K.S.I. as you ordered, Primanar. We have the necessary documentation required for infiltration." Drift shook his helm slowly. "Are you positive you wish to do this? I do not like for you to be in so dangerous a situation."

"Ah, ease up, Drift. They ain't gonna hurt her in there." Hound adjusted his potbelly, his various armaments jangling as he did so. Another of his mufflers, the Cybertronian version of cigars, sat burning in his oral cavity. "It ain't like we're sending her onto the battlefield."

"Not to mention that she isn't going in alone." Crosshairs crouched with her perched onto his lap. Her feet barely reach to his knees even with them completely stretched out. The goggled Saboteur eyed her newest ally. "The others were right. You are abnormally large for a human male."

The blonde groaned in misery at having to keep explain propriety to the Cybertronians while Ryder laughed, taking their words in stride.

"I'm Ryder. It's nice to meet'cha." He raised a brow. "What's yer names?"

The quad introduced themselves succinctly while Sam eased her way off of Crosshair's lap. The doctor was right there, helping to lift her down. A blush touched her cheeks at the feel of his big hands on her person. She hadn't felt this way since Hunter.

"Did you grab the Screen, too?"

"Screen?" Ryder asked her, his brows tucking downward.

In answer, Bumblebee reached out his servo to hand a dainty chip off to her. The chip was barely the size of her topmost pinkie-knuckle. She touched the circlet against the crown of her head and urged it away into subspace. Instantly she felt the weight of the Allspark's power amplify within her. Or rather, she felt its weight more severely.

Her body really did struggle with the enormity of the Other power housed within her. Despite the modifications her form had undergone over the years, a human simply never should have been able to house such energy.

Sam raised the chip to her throat and pressed the delicate-looking filaments against her skin. When she pushed they sank painlessly into her skin. The sickening feeling of bugs crawling all over her assailed her.

"Holy shit." Ryder approached her, bending at the waist to watch the 'transformation' take place.

"It is called a Screen by She. It creates a holomorphic display directly over her skin to alter appearance." Drift watched the change take place, waving for Crosshairs to hand the two humans the identification cards they would need. "Samantha's face is too easily recognized. This invention allows her to blend in to human society without notice."

Only partially listening now, the Primanar used the Cybertonian-made dagger she kept safely tucked away in her thigh-high leather boots to lop off a good three feet of her hair. The plated strands hit the ground with a _thunk_ , dust drifting up around them.

Ryder about choked on his own breath.

"It grows back very quickly," she assured him. It wouldn't be the first time nor the last that she hacked at her hair. Once, when she'd been fed up with it and its weight, she'd shorn it down to a spiky pixie cut. It had grown back down to her shoulders within two weeks and was to her mid-calf again by the end of three months. "It's was too long for most fashion dictates."

Deftly, she undid the braid she often utilized and switched to a reverse-Dutch braid, working from the back of her scalp and up until it all gathered together into a single, wavy tail. The man eyeballed her, most likely noting her adept fingers. She'd learned in college that a girl with long hair needed to know a thing or two about braids. If she didn't, she'd have been sweating her ass off with its free weight.

"These will get us in, then?" She gestured with the white ID badge in her hand.

"Of course." Crosshairs rose to his full height, his peds crunching against the dry, cracked ground. "I still don't get why one of the human termagants can't do this mission. Isn't it time for you to have your monthly rest-cycle?"

When the four titans eyed her critically, she began to scramble. This was bad timing at its finest.

"I'm the best person for the job, okay. Now, let's get moving. They only have the scanning every three months. If we miss it now, we miss our shot." She waved them all down.

"Come on. Transform and let's roll out."


	4. Chapter Four: Return to War

**Chapter Four: Return to War**

The day was balmy as best. At worst, Samantha would have called it intolerable.

She adjusted her pure white slacks for the second time in as many minutes. She'd gotten out of habit since her mother's passing, God bless the woman, of wearing formal attire. Once upon a time she'd had to make frequent appearances before the varying governments of Earth and had had to dress accordingly. There was little need now that she kept as much as she could out of the public eye.

To most humans she was dead. To some she was a legend. To the few that knew, that truly knew, she was either loved or hunted. She had the children of the first families…and she had Cemetery Wind. She did not doubt for a single moment that if they got their hands on her she would cease to exist in the most literal sense of the term.

"You look fine." Ryder pushed his Aviators further up the bridge of his nose, grinning at her from the side of his mouth. He'd abandoned his coat back at the sub-shop and instead wore his crisp black shirt and dark blue jeans. A black Stetson sat heavily on his head. He looked like a damned cowboy, GQ model with that half a smirk on his sinfully handsome face.

They were seated in Bumblebee, the next queued to enter through the scanning gate. The armed security officers didn't faze her in the least. Spending human lifetimes within secret military installations and embroiled in an alien War tended to deaden a person's instinctual flight response to perceived danger.

She'd changed into a pristine set of white dress slacks and peach camisole. An infinity scarf of the same blinding white draped over her neck and chest, a tannish leather, short-sleeved jacket covering her shoulders. The clothing change was a necessity for her part of their infiltration mission, otherwise she'd have stayed in her grey blouse and tattered jeans. A high-end women's clothing store she remembered from her political days was still operable within Chicago and had presented her with her current outfit.

She was nerved-up. In truth, the day wasn't all that hot. It was her mind that was running full-steam that had her sweating. That sixth sense she'd told Ryder about niggled at her. Something was going to happen. _Something_ was about to go very wrong – and she had no idea what it was or how to stop it.

Ryder pulled them up to the boom-gate, holding out his ID negligently. She offered her own stiffly, not appreciating the leer handed down to her by the armed officer at her own window. 'Bee sensed her irritation and knew the man with the gun was the cause of her distress.

:: Leave it alone, 'Bee. :: There was a touch of the Other in her order, the Allspark shining through. She didn't need the Scout defending her honor only for them to get caught before they even began.

:: As you command. ::

"Kinda an outdated piece to be bringing in for scanning," Ryder's guard noted suspiciously. The good doctor simply shrugged one shoulder.

"I don' ask questions, man. I jus' deliver what I'm 'spose to an' collect my check." An impish grin played across his face. "Gotta keep my girl dressed nice, y'see. Happy wife, happy life an' all that jazz."

"She your wife?" Her own guard backed away a single step, but drew his brows down in bafflement as he looked at her empty ring finger.

"Nah, man, but don' I wish." A blush stole across her cheeks at the captivating wink he tossed her way. When his big hand patted her knee closest to him, she could have sworn she felt a spark shoot between them. She was also willing to swear on a bible or religious relic of any order that there was truth rimming his statement.

"All right. You're cleared to go through."

The lead guard waved them on. They proceeded slowly, following the various signs first through above-ground garages and then into K.S.I. itself. Sam knew from the schematics that the quad had shown them that they would be entering close to the main labs.

The lens in her right eye itched. While she couldn't see through her eye, she could still feel. The contact-sized lens she'd placed against her pupil was an intricately designed camera that allowed all of the quad – and any others tuned in to that frequency – to see what she saw in real-time.

"Don' scratch. You'll just irritate it." He pulled her hand up from where she'd been fidgeting with the silken camisole to kiss her knuckles. Her heart stuttered helplessly. "Once we're done I have some eye drops tha' ya can use. Should make that itch go right away."

"Thank you," she mumbled, wishing not for the first time that she could see him fully and without hindrance. Being blind in one eye proved to be more and more miserable with every passing year. She never could get completely used to how her depth perception had changed, how she had to move her whole head or even body to catch things that would have normally been in her right peripheral, and how bad she could suffer from headaches when strong wavelengths of light penetrated the blackness of her blinded eye.

"Think nothin' of it, sweetheart."

They coasted for a short time more, weaving through a dozen or so parked cars straight off the showroom floor, before easing into the first and primary display room. Sam tensed as Bumblebee himself screeched to a halt, her narrowed eyes looking up at the prototype she'd feared all along.

"Christ," she grunted, easing out of the secure cab of her Guardian.

"Looks kinda like ya, 'Bee." There was an idle Pagani Huayra parked beside the Bumblebee lookalike hoisted between two cables. It was obvious that, once transformed, the red and black, human-engineered automaton would become the Huayra. Vid-displays around the room showcased 'Stinger's blueprinted design and his designers' feedback.

'Bee grunted in disapproval at the recorded slights against him. Samantha herself couldn't fault his ire. She was mad, too. Her Bumblebee was not inferior by any means. There was no flaw in his design as far as she could see…other than the fact that he'd assumed an older alt that she liked less than any of his previous ones.

"Calm down, 'Bee." She patted his hood, circling the red copycat. He did look much like her 'Bee. His armor was a bit more angular. His battlemask looked to be permanently affixed to his faceplates. It made him appear perpetually dangerous.

"What is that relic doing on my floor?"

Sam turned, eyeing the man coming towards her with a critical eye. He was dressed dutifully in a three-piece grey suit with a pastel pink tie. His glasses were thicker-rimmed, sometimes a fashion-do, sometimes a fashion-don't depending on the decade. He had obviously gone a handful of days without a shave, which was surprising for his position within K.S.I.. Traditionally, businessmen with a networth a large as his was clean-shaven. Otherwise, he was meticulously put together.

He looked her up and down, confusion clear on his face. He wouldn't be able to see through the Screen. Heck, if he dared to touch her he would feel skin just as she felt it when she embraced any of the mechs' holoforms. According to a few of the kids, though, no matter how she looked there was just something in her aura that screamed 'other'.

"Do I know you?"

"Not yet," she evaded, looking back up at Stinger. "Impressive work, Mister Joyce. Truly, you have done incredible work."

"Thank you." He shook off his unease, sneering again at her Guardian's alt. "Why is that antiquated piece of machinery in my building? What does this company look like to you? K.S.I. are innovators of science. We are the future of mankind. _That_ thing can only convey the depressing reality of our past."

"Mister Joyce, the past is far from depressing. Every word you speak is being added to the tapestry of history. Every thought you have, every move you make forward, is but another piece of the past being woven in." She grinned at him chidingly. It was the same look she gave the children when she passed down a bit of wisdom onto them. "The past is a growing thing. It is the future that recedes more and more rapidly with every year."

She hummed, waving off K.S.I.'s figurehead's befuddled expression carelessly. "I am quite fond of my relics. It's quite amazing what such old things are capable of after having survived the test of time."

Joshua shook his head, meandering away from her. She'd made him uncomfortable. Good. A bevvy of voices drew nearer and the Primanar could see that there had been a tour of some kind taking place. An Asian woman had her arms crossed waspishly over her chest, her simmering eyes glaring at Joyce.

The man cleared his throat once and loudly.

"Get that piece of scrap off my floor, please." He eyed her critically once more, sparing only a moment to glance at her impossibly large compatriot, before turning back to the group. "Sorry for the interruption. If you'll follow me this way…"

The blonde watched them go silently, her eyes not leaving their retreating forms. Once they were out of sight and hearing range, she turned back to the still stoic Ryder. He'd come up behind her at some point, his front almost touching against her back. In any other scenario, he would have looked like her bodyguard with those still-shaded eyes of his.

"Fallback to the others. I'm going in."

"You shouldn't be in here alone," he cautioned her, worry seeping into his voice. He wasn't wrong. Unfortunately, there wasn't much choice. It was easier for a single person to sneak around a premises than it was for two, especially with one being as big as he was.

"I agree. But I'll be fine." She touched his chest in parting, grinning softly up at him. "Go. I'll be fine. They've got my eyes."

There was no further discussion or argument as Ryder tucked back into Bumblebee and departed. Relief was a prominent emotion that bubbled up within her. As much as she felt safer with any of the Cybertronians beside her, she also didn't like them in harm's way. Megatron had been right in his earlier statement that she wouldn't let anyone she cared about get hurt if she could help it.

Her heeled boots, which she'd deigned to continue wearing under her slacks, clicked against first the marble flooring of the showroom and then metal of the hallways. Sporadically touching her fingers against the walls, she released tiny pulses of Allspark energy. She used the pulses like an evolved kind of sonar to map out the terrain. It didn't take her any more than four branching intersections to meander across a high-security access panel.

 _Child's play_.

A single touch of her finger to the pad and a jolt of power had the hydraulic door sliding open to admit her. A quick peek in the data files stored within the main hub of security panels, all easily accessible via that one pad, gave her an image of a female tech she could imitate for better movement. Another urge, this one to the Screen, had the holomorphic coating shifting to make her look like Susan Patterson, a leggy blonde woman with roughly her same build.

She nodded in greeting to the few techs that passed her in these hallways, knowing that to speak would be to give her cover away. The Screen could change a person's outward appearance. Not their voice. She was still working on that modification.

Halfway through the labs she felt her stomach drop out from inside her. Not literally, but the actuality of it happening couldn't have been any less disorienting or debilitating.

She'd wandered into an ice-strewn room. Disassembled on an oversized workman's bench was, for all intents and purposes, pieces of Megatron. No, this wasn't _her_ Megatron. This was one of K.S.I.'s little projects. They'd been recreating her mechs – she had yet to see a femme design – based off of their diagramed bipedal forms. She didn't know why they were taking him apart, but the pieces of him were being broken down to their simplest form. The base metal they were made of.

Rage consumed her through one particular Bond. The real Megatron was furious that the humans dared to make a _subpar_ copy of him.

Further inspection in connecting suites showed think-tanks and cybernetic equipment. There were original frame parts scattered here and there. Her heart hurt to see a familiar face, one of the very few of her mechs that had been deactivated by Cemetery Wind before they'd caught on to their actions, staring unseeingly back at her.

Scrapper. An Autobot. He hadn't been quite as young as Bumblebee, but he was close. His rounded optics were unlit. His helm had been removed from his body probably since his transportation to headquarters. Wire and node had been funneled down into his processor. Glancing at the nearby screens, she cheered up very minutely to see that the corporation had been unable to draw anything more than rough-draft schematics for protoforms from his databanks.

He'd been cognizant enough in his last moments to wipe his entire processor.

Tears dotted her lashes, remembering the pain that had struck her during the middle of the night with his offlining. She hadn't been able to grab onto him quick enough in her mind and he'd slipped unerringly into the Well of Allsparks. He was where Skidz and Mudflap were. Where countless others were.

"It helps if you just think of them as machines." A feminine voice advised her. Sam didn't stiffen or turn. She merely continued to look into those unseeing optics. "It helped me when I first got here. Just walking, talking machines."

"They're not, though." Her chest hurt. She didn't care that she was talking when she knew she shouldn't be. "They have minds that work similar to ours. They live. They have souls just like us. He was murdered."

The other woman winced. "At least it was one of the bad ones. Y'know, the Decepticons that tried to enslave mankind?"

"He was an Autobot," she corrected blandly. Then she shook her head firmly. "It doesn't matter what he was. Everyone is forgetting that there are no sides anymore. There is no them and us. There is only _we_. Their world and ours are One."

The sudden approach of armed personnel had her smirking. Four of the five pointed semi-autos in her direction. Techs scrambled to get out of the way, not wishing to be shot if one of the men misfired. The one in the lead, a well-built man in his mid-forties, assessed her coolly.

The woman who addressed her earlier shrunk back against a nearby wall, bemusement sketched across her pretty face.

"Come with us, Pretender."

"I'm not a Pretender," she informed him smartly, plucking the Screen from her throat. She subspaced the scrap of technology instantly, not wanting it to fall into their hands. The greedy savages had already stolen enough from their emigrated allies. Gasps abounded. Oh, her face was well known. Even if the humans thought she was dead, her face was never forgotten.

She gave the guards credit. None of them flinched.

"Come with us," the leader reiterated, reaching out to touch her.

Samantha felt her eyes flare, the lens in her right eye fritzing out at the power overload. She snatched his left wrist with her right hand and squeezed brutally until she felt the bones crack. The pain made his face crumple along with his body. His knees struck the ground soundly. Radiant power dripped from her pores as she snarled down at the man buckled before her. He wasn't so proud looking now. He looked like he was bowing to her, subjugated to her will.

A dark part of her soul rejoiced at the sight before she brutally bashed the bitch down.

"You will not touch my person, human," the Allspark, _She_ , spoke through her. Her anger was echoed by the hundreds of thousands of Cybertronians on this world. Her Bonds. Hers. They cheered for the might of her. They urged those nearest to her to join in the fray.

She called for them, too.

K.S.I. was in need of a makeover.

The taser shot she was struck with didn't inhibit her when she was like this. The Allspark, she'd learned, was capable of shielding her in a barrier of sorts. Electrical devices could not affect her. Blades or bullets could wound, but not electricity.

"If you are through, I will come with you." She plucked the fine strings from her person, enjoying their stupor. She released the lead guard smoothly. He clutched his now limp appendage to his chest and glared at her. He had apparently not realized her greater strength until that moment. "Would you like to lead or should I?"

The snark in her tone had them branching off around her. They moved slowly, but with precision. They'd had military training, then. At least Joshua Joyce wasn't foolish enough to hire out-of-the-academy recruits. He needed the muscle to back his company.

Guns still aimed at her, safeties off, she was marched to a bank of elevators she'd encountered earlier. She was stalwart even in such a confined space with barrels baring down on her. They could kill her certainly and surely. This body would be no more, but they would unleash a plague upon mankind if they did. An innate knowing, a neglected survival mechanism, within every living human being could feel the truth resonating within them even if they couldn't understand the words.

It occurred to her offhandedly that perhaps that buried instinct was why she had yet to meet her end by _human_ hands.

Several floors up, the doors opened soundlessly and Joshua stood grinning at her smugly. He looked like the cat that caught the canary. Even with the Allspark receding from her psyche, she didn't feel the intimidation she should have felt. She was unbothered by any of this.

"I thought you might come by one of these days. A bit of corporate espionage?" He joined them in the elevator before it continued its ascent.

"Not hardly. Your developments are hardly worth my time. I do recall seeing your sponsorship offered on several of my own innovations, however." His eyes widened. "Oh, didn't you know? A pity. I had thought you'd see right through my various aliases. You are after all a prodigy of your generation."

By the time they'd reached one of the upper floors, perhaps three-quarters of the way up K.S.I.'s main building, she'd managed to push the Allspark back down. She knew she was it and it was her, but she never felt fully like herself when that innate power bubbled forth into her consciousness. It wasn't like she was being danced around by a puppeteer, either. Sam felt… _more_ than who she was.

Her right-hand index finger and thumb kneaded at her temples. A headache. She had another thrice-damned headache from letting her psyche switch as it had. She likened it to coming down off of a high.

"Guilty conscience?" Joshua inquired snidely, disliking her vocalization of his ineptitude in deciphering who she was to all of the companies he'd attempted to buy out or into. He was one of the top five richest people of planet Earth…there were very few companies that he couldn't buy out. The clue was there, clear as crystal. The offensive strikes to his attempts to infiltrate her various networks was staggering.

"No. Idiocy simply gives me a headache." If he could be rude, so could she.

She was led into a large meeting room. The white leather chairs and long glass table were pristine. There was no art presented in the room. No clutter or color. The design was militant at best and stagnant at worst.

She was gestured into a seat by the barrel of one of the threatening guns.

"Miss Witwicky. The honor is mine."

That rasping, semi-gruff voice had her whole body tensing. She glared through her fingers at the older man approaching from the other side of the room. He had apparently been waiting for their arrival. For Joyce's part, the CEO took a seat across from and neighboring hers. He appeared willing and eager to sit in on the show.

While she had never met the man in person before, she could not mistake Attinger for anyone else. She had audios and optics everywhere. She'd received enough intel over the years on the decorated CIA agent to be able to fill a full-length novel. He was also the man pulling the strings with Cemetery Wind.

"Miss Witwicky, I am Harold Attinger. I work with the United States government." He touched his own chest lightly, a gesture of import. "It is my job to see to the safety of this Nation. In doing so I see to the safety of our world."

"You're a sleazy political slug."

"Now, Miss Witwicky, is this really the venue for name-calling?"

"Pardon me. Allow me to elaborate. You are a leech. A parasite on the ass-end of mankind." She leaned back in her chair, eyeballing his tailored suit. His issued pistol was holstered at his shoulder-strap. She knew he must have others elsewhere.

Distantly she heard glass breaking in this sound-proofed room. She felt Bonds drawing closer, a bloodthirsty rage broiling in each of them. A sickening smile threatened to overtake her visage.

"Please, Samantha – may I call you Samantha?" _No. No you may not, you peckerwood_. "I know you all came to Earth and thought it a lovely place to stay, but really, none of your kind are meant to be here. I am asking _politely_ that you vacate the planet and leave Earth to Her natural inhabitants. We humans want no part in the wars you wage between yourselves."

"I am human, Attinger. I have simply been burdened with a heavier weight than the one you hold upon your shoulders. You could not make me leave my home – and you will not make the Cybertronians leave theirs as well. Earth belongs to All now, Attinger. You were not alive to see the path we were spiraling down. This new Earth, Cybertronian and Earthen combined, is salvation to all of us."

"The Transformers are a blight on the face of this planet. They were not meant to be here…and neither were you."

"Your grandfather wasn't even a twinkle in his daddy's eye when I first walked this Earth." She leaned forward, her eyes shining again at her peaked emotions. "In all my time I have come to see that we, as mortal beings, are unfit to judge the rightness or wrongness of another being. Life is what it is. It is our lot to accept and live with the imperfections of each other – or die attempting to achieve a standard of perfection that is both unrealistic and incorporeal."

"So you will not work with us?" The man had a one-track mind. He was a persistent bastard. She would give him that much. "You will remain against us."

"It's _you_ I'm against, not my people."

"Abomination," she heard him mutter from under his breath. Indignation broiled within her. Would she ever be rid of these foolish, self-righteous assholes? Would she be able to go even a single decade without hatred wearing a human mask knocking down her door? In those early years it was the Decepticons who beat her down, but now it was her own kind.

There was a muted thump of helicopter blades. Samantha neither needed to see the two men's startled faces nor turn her own head to see the Autobots rising up from the lobby floor. She could feel them as though they were an extension of her own hand. She did, however, bury her head into her arms to keep imploding glass from scraping against her face.

The strike Bumblebee made to the glass was strategically contained. The whole wall shuddered inward a single foot before shattering to a million or so pieces. Attinger was older, but no less skilled in combat than he had been in his younger years. She saw him reaching for his holstered gun and reacted more swiftly than even he. Whether he meant to fire upon her or the Autobots, she cared not.

The chair she'd been sitting in she latched onto by the armrest. With a mighty heave, she hurtled the hefty chair into the older man's torso. She might have heard the crack of bone along with his pained cry, but she was already rushing for the gaping hole which had at one point been an inward-facing window. 'Bee's left arm was outstretched to catch her while his right kept a secure hold on one of Drift's skids.

"Down!" She shouted over the chaos. The employees of K.S.I. were screaming in terror as the other Autobots ran rampant. She could feel the quad on the lower levels that they were nearing now. Both of her Primes were there, too, impudent rage beating against her psyche from their lines.

"Destroy it all!" Optimus bellowed.

"Burn it to the ground!" Megatron echoed his brother with feral intent.

Heat emanated from the brutalized hallways. The scent of oil and smoke tainted the once purely filtered air. Rather than put her down onto her feet or flee with her, Bumblebee carried her into the mayhem. Drift ran ahead of them to join his warrior brethren, his blade cleaving million-dollar equipment in two with the ease of buttering bread.

The Primanar took in the carnage with a rock settling in her stomach. She could see no human bodies and for that she was thankful, but she knew only the first Prime's oath of not killing humans kept their servos staid. Megatron, reluctantly, had agreed upon sharing Primehood with Optimus to follow in his lead.

Within reason, of course.

Only once he, too, had joined in the fray did Bumblebee set her down. She was tucked away from the immediate line of destruction.

Ryder had his arms crossed and was shaking his head sadly, surveying a still functioning bank of computers. Hound kicked a retrofitted golf cart, the ones still used at airports across the world for harried travelers, clear across the lab and into a tube filled to brimming with what the humans called 'Transformium'.

 _Wonder how insulted the mechs would be if they knew that's what the humans named their base metal?_ It was a faraway thought and one she didn't care to voice out anytime soon. Not with matters as they were.

"There's something corrupted in the data," Ryder gestured towards a set of numbers on the foremost screen. The errors were minute, but she could see them flashing in and out of existence. Passing a cursory glance over the human-made Megatron, which was already through about fifty-percent deconstruction, she decided that whatever this error was constituted for their 'failure'.

"They done messed with some shit they shoulda left alone, mmhmm."

Sam jumped with shock, not prepared for the stout, blue drone to pop up on the console. Ryder reared back a bit, his eyes wide as he looked down his nose at Brains.

"What in the world are you doing here, Brains?" She picked him up and cuddled him to her chest as though he were a favored doll from her childhood. His exo didn't bother her against her skin like it had when she was closer to human than 'other'. His weight was entirely insignificant. "You were supposed to be in Antarctica. Why are you at K.S.I.? Why didn't I feel you before now?"

"Hid my aft in one of their personal vehicles. Can you believe I'm pretendin' to be a _Dell_ for one of those bipeds?" His armor rattled as he shuddered in revulsion. "All that metal they been chippin' off of us does good at hidin' a drone's signature as small as mine. That tech that took me be lookin' at some nasty human shit. Got a virus in my mainframe that I went offline to get rid of. Dirty slaggin' human minds."

"Stop! That's company property and you are trespassing!"

"Oh, for the love of God," Sam muttered, turning away from the computers with Brains still in her arms. Ryder tailed after her, his bigger body shielding her from behind. Not that there was anything that threatened to come upon them. Everywhere one looked there was rubble.

"They are not property, human," Optimus rumbled in a terrifyingly dark tone. His optics momentarily flashed red. "They were mechs. They were living beings. _Friends_."

"Collateral damage, alien," Joshua Joyce adjusted his suit in an unconscious fidget of a gesture. His nose wrinkled in distain causing his glasses to hike up a degree. "Haven't you heard? You're outdated. You're not wanted here. I'm offering a service to mankind and you are interfering."

"Cybertronians aren't just machines, Joyce." Sam shook her head unhappily, moving to lean up against Megatron's shin-plates. The Warlord was containing himself if only barely. He desired to continue his rampage. It had been some time since his brother hadn't scolded him for annihilating anything, particularly of the human variety.

"We don't need them, Witwicky. We have enough of their metal now. We can make more of them. They are obsolete."

"That metal was not meant for you to use, Joyce. There are only three powers in this universe and the next that can use sentio-metalicon as it was meant to be used. You call it Transformium thinking the name is cute and catchy, but you don't understand what you have unleashed on yourselves." There was a niggling sense at the back of her mind again, the one that told her that that being who'd been evading her bumped across her borders once again. Its presence wasn't unnoted at so crucial a time.

The feeling that something important, something cataclysmic, was about to go down struck anew.

"And I fear there's something else that none of us are ready for." She looked around at the wreckage of a lab and released a gusty sigh. "We've lingered here too long. Come along everyone. Mister Joyce has a mess to pick up."

"Samantha, we need to…"

"I said 'come along', Optimus." Her entire body hardened with resolution. "That was not a request."

"As you wish." She hated when any of them sounded so forlorn and hated even more when she had to push her power off on them, but she felt it coming. They needed to leave this place sooner rather than later.

It was Bumblebee that picked both she and Ryder up to carry them outside. Joshua shouted after them for a short time, but his voice was drowned out by the clomp of heavy peds and then distance. Once they were back outside, her Guardian scarcely allowed them to stand freely before shifting over to his abruptly updated alt mode and ushering them into his seats.

"When did this happen?" She inquired as Brains crawled off of her lap to the center console. Her hands fondled the steering wheel lovingly.

"Almost as soon as we exited K.S.I.. He ain't hidin' no more so I s'pose that's why he took a newer form. There was one in the parkin' lot out back."

* * *

Back at K.S.I., Attinger dogged Joyce's steps.

"The latest models? You have run them through simulations with success, yes? The systems are all operational?"

"Those were simulations, Attinger. _Just_ simulations. We haven't worked all the bugs out of the operational systems yet and there is only one other unit we can operate remotely at this facility." Joyce growled with impatience. "If you had kept up on _your_ end of the bargain, soldier-boy, we'd have a full battalion at our disposal here and not just Beijing!"

"You were instructed to continue work regardless of our involvement, Joshua. We're granting you permissions which you previously would not have been able to obtain and without those, you sir would be nowhere." Attinger cut in front of Joyce, his eyes going as hard as ice. "You are indemnified, Joyce. Time to pay up."

"You have no idea what you're doing, Attinger," the K.S.I. CEO warned darkly, his head shaking.

* * *

"What is that?" Samantha stretched forward in her seat, as far as the modified seatbelt would allow, and squinted as best she could to see the oncoming Mack truck.

"Hey, ain't that… _is_ that a Cybertronian?"

"No." She was shaking her head firmly. She could feel that the truck wasn't like any of her Bonds, but it wasn't an entirely human vehicle despite its appearance. It was also disturbingly familiar in design.

:: Megatron…how far ahead of us are you? ::

:: A few miles. I am already returning to your side. :: While the gravel tone of his voice in her mind was soothing in its own way, the nervousness that trickled through their line unnerved her. The great Lord Megatron did not show weakness. :: Do not engage. Stay with your Guardian. ::

The white and silver Mack swerved and rotated on the other side of the highway before jackknifing over the median. While any traditionally borne Cybertronian would have transformed in the magnificent shift of gears and plates that was so common for their race, this creature was not native to Cybertron or the Allspark. He was a bastardized Earthen creation made from the hijacked parts of other once-living beings.

"Fuck!" She screamed as the Mack truck rocketed over them in hundreds of thousands of cubic pieces. His entire body shifted like a cybernetic data-dump. There was nothing discernable to him until the waterfall of metal reshaped into the solid mass of what had to be Megatron's lookalike.

The creature crashed through an oncoming semi-truck's load, the boxes of new-age Beanie Babies scattering to the four winds. A big-eyed seal bounced against Bumblebee's rear windshield as he forged ahead as fast as his wheels could carry them.

The reshaped sword, which had been another piece of the creature's appendage only seconds before, sluiced through a family-sized sedan. Sam's breath stuttered painfully to see the car split in two, mini-explosions rocking it to either side. A stray limb, a human one, was visible tumbling from the midsection of the halved-car. It was no longer attacked to a body.

"Jesus Mary and Joseph," Ryder whispered in horror, his eyes huge. He'd undoubtedly seen the same gruesome image she just had.

Another vehicle, the Pagani known as Stinger, darted past the havoc-wreaking titan. The not-Megatron was raging at nothing, destroying property and lives. A sick, demented part of her psyche demanded she give Joyce a well-deserved 'I told you so' the next time she saw him. No matter how small, Cybertronian technology relating to their existence as a whole was _not_ meant for human hands.

Stinger engaged the rear of their troupe, Crosshairs, Hound, and Drift, in heavy-weapons fire. The three engaged immediately and without hesitation, determined to give Bumblebee and the Prime any lead they could get.

Very suddenly, Samantha lurched forward and gagged. Her skull felt cleaved in the center, her hands shakily rising to cup either temple.

"Sam?" Ryder asked worriedly, his attention pinging between she and the battle raging behind them.

"It's coming," she groaned, feeling the presence of the one who'd skirted her awareness so effectively shooting down through the Earth's atmosphere. The Grid was unable to close off its boarders to the intruder in time, but she felt the bit of awareness that clung to every structure that had once made up Cybertron register the unknown entity. Whomever it was, they would not be leaving Earth in one piece.

"What? What's coming?"

"Something we aren't ready for." She grappled for the being's line, hoping to turn them before they arrived. Every time she touched against it, though, she felt it burning down to the pits of her soul. This being was _tainted_ and that taint repelled the Allspark like a bug-zapper against a gnat. No, the Allspark was stronger than the taint in the being's Spark, but she felt the very real possibility of it corrupting her. She felt its avarice and hatred. If she brushed against it, if she struck at it too hard, she would risk it absorbing into all of her Bonds.

Missiles fired past them as she writhed against the awareness of the encroaching interloper. Her eyes goggled as a logging truck was struck and skidded sideways under a bridge. It must have struck something, another large vehicle, because flamed erupted from its opposite side. Cars jammed up on either side of it, some striking other vehicles and stationary pillars to create the worst traffic-jam in recent history.

And they were heading right for it.

"Shit!" Ryder hollered as Bumblebee shifted around them. Sam, herself, squealed as she was catapulted high up into the air and at a forward angle through the moving parts of her transforming Guardian. Optimus was ahead of them, diving like an Olympic swimmer through the side of yet another trailer which coasted atop the overpass.

She reached out her flailing limbs and latched onto Ryder like an urchin. He clung to her in equal measure, his heart beating a heavy staccato beat against her ear. Between one breath and the next, she pulled them into a Warp. Not a moment too soon as the jagged wreckage of the trailer threatened to disembowel them in their flight. The Warp was infinitely short, barely a second of time, but enough so that they appeared on the other side of the trailer.

Optimus snatched them up into his servos seamlessly, tucking them up against his chassis. With the world turning around them so chaotically, she could still see the welcome sight of Megatron's jet-form sailing towards them. The less welcome image of the not-Megatron disassembling behind them as the Prime transformed back into his alt was also prevalent.

:: Do not let Her out of your optics, Prime! :: Megatron ordered through a broad comm.. The ferocity of the command hurt her ears.

Optimus did not respond. He did not need to.

She was the priority. Their priority. No matter what befell them or mankind, she was the single most important being in the universe to them.

"What are we doing?" Ryder asked several moments later. At the speeds which they were moving, they'd reached a far more rural part of the city. In truth, they had reached another town and county. Two large farms bracketed them on either side. There was less chance of human casualty here.

"I don't know," she replied honestly, her head hurting immensely. "This is all so wrong. There is something very bad, something beyond _wrong_ going on here."

"Brace yourselves," Optimus warned just as his frame was jarred by multiple missiles. She and Ryder were ejected in opposite directions this time. Through her one and only eye she could see the big man tumbling out of the impromptu doorway Optimus had made within his body, his shoulders striking the grass roughly. The Prime growled as he kept her underneath him and out of the immediate line of gunfire.

Sam covered her face and head with her arms, curling her body up into as small a ball as possible. Had she been entirely human, she'd likely have broken bones beyond just scraping skin as she tumbled like a roly-poly over the asphalt.

"Do not touch the Primanar!" Optimus bellowed, charging at the transformed not-Megatron. His battle sword was out, clashing with the only slightly-smaller titan. She unrolled from her fetal position, wincing at the soreness that plagued her.

:: Warp to safety, Sam! :: Megatron boomed through their comm as he dropped from the sky, engaging with the not-him as well. The two Primes fought as a well-oiled unit. Their movements complimented each other. As much as she admired their fighting prowess, she knew that the best thing for her at the moment was to do as the second Prime commanded.

Except she couldn't.

Horror struck as she attempted to slip into that area caught in time and space and couldn't. She focused all of her senses into it, centered her mind on breaking through that fissure. She felt as though she hit a wall. She could feel the cracks there and felt the energy crackling against her skin, but she couldn't make the Warp happen.

"There's a disruption!" She screamed into the air. She crawled first towards the side of the road, then rose to her feet to run. The cornfield was her only chance for escape at this point. Behind, her two mechs fought with abandon, their anger at Joyce's manipulations to their core make-up funneling into each attack.

She hadn't made it more than five steps when something struck her from her blindside. She felt a distinctive crunch – heard it, even – as her right shoulder collapsed under the outrageous pressure of whatever struck her. Agony ripped through her even as she screamed. The lush green grass was a small grace for her forced landing on her opposite side several feet away.

Sam rolled, cradling her right arm. She didn't dare turn her head to look at the damage that had been wrought upon it, not only because she didn't want to see the gruesomeness of it, but also because she had to keep her sights trained upon the incoming threat.

Striding up the highway as though he owned all and sunder was a black-armored beast of a mech. His faceplates and chassis shifted quickly into the shape of a long-range weapon. The armament he'd used to fire upon her, a smaller servo-sized weapon, still smoked beside him.

The Allspark supplied his designation to her on a hiss of rage.

 _Lockdown_.

Lockdown fired. The projectile was an electromagnetic one. It moved almost faster than her eyes could blink, striking Optimus Prime in the back. Megatron moved to catch the toppling Prime, but was tackled by the not-him. In garbled English and through the pounding in her ears, Sam could hear the manmade titan call himself Galvatron.

Optimus struck the ground like a ton of bricks. His plating cracked the asphalt even further. She reached out to him, feeling his primary control center shutting down. What he'd been struck with was similar to a paralyzing agent in a human. It would immobilize him for a time, but for how long she didn't know. It didn't much matter, though. Any amount of time with the Prime out of commission was officially no-beuno.

"Come here, Primanar," Lockdown rumbled sadistically, snatching her up with a careless servo. She cried out in pain at her injured shoulder pressing up against his squeezing digits.

"Fuck you," she spat at him, missing his chassis by a good foot.

Inwardly she began shutting down the Bonds. They'd felt her pain and knew her fear, but she didn't dare to allow them further access to her emotions or thoughts. They would need their full wits about them to stop whatever was about to happen and they would be unable to do that if she weighed them down with her misery.

Denial was the prevalent feeling as she shut each of them out.

"Good, little fleshling. They were right about you."

"Who?" She grumbled, wincing every time she struggled against his hold on her. Her arm was on absolute fire!

"The remaining Creators of course. They want your Prime back."

"He's mine," she snarled, energy flaring in her eyes. A shock coursed through the being's servo, deadening her connection to the Allspark. Her head lolled backwards, a dizzying rush of nothingness assailing her. Lockdown chuckled at her wilted posture.

"Nifty trinket they gave me. Assured me that it would shut your human body off from the Allspark long enough for me to apprehend you and Optimus Prime." He gestured severely with his free servo which in-turn had Galvatron doubling his efforts to maim and destroy Megatron. The others were still not to be seen, most likely still openly engaged with Stinger or attempting to reach them in time.

"Let her go," Optimus rumbled, his body as useless as her own at the moment.

"I think not, Prime. Not only is she my bargaining chip against you, the Creators have demanded her return. More accurately, they need the Allspark back."

"Over my dead body," she mumbled, her head feeling detached from the rest of her body.

"Be careful what you wish for, Insect." She cried out again as he squeezed her to the point she cusped on blacking out. Megatron howled in rage, fighting a seemingly never-ending battle against his human-made counterpart.

"How can you harm her? She is our future. She is your Primanar!" Optimus struggled against his own body, willing it into motion. Even with the Bonds shut down, she could feel him reaching out for her comfort and to comfort in turn. He wanted to reassure her that everything would be well. It frightened her to think – to _know_ – that this time he was wrong.

Somehow she knew that this time things would be very different.

"The Creators freed me. She cannot control me." His smile was purely evil on his intricate faceplates. "And she will not control you for much longer, Prime. You will have your new Masters to serve…just as it was always meant to be."

Lockdown pulled himself up onto the descended cargo-ship, a Cybertronian netting clasping from underneath around her fallen Prime. He squeezed her again, delighting in her cry of anguish.

"Come now, _Primanar_." He spoke the title in a sneer. His green optics glimmered with malice. "Let us return to my ship so that you can be made more _comfortable_ for your flight."

The dropping of her stomach and the taste of acidic juices in her mouth told her instinctively how much she would dislike the _comforts_ he promised her.

* * *

Below and nearly a mile away, Ryder stood helplessly aside as a dropship lifted into the sky towards the floating Warship, two precious pieces of cargo held in its grasp.

The Matrix thrummed against his chest, a boiling rage vibrating through its inconsequential frame. The light of its center grew brighter, its power reaching out for its counterpart.

His jaw hardened as the Quad rolled up from behind him. In the distance, Megatron was somersaulting through the sky, the not-him clutched between his mighty servos. When he plummeted, he was near enough for Ryder to see the not-him break off into thousands of pieces before reassembling far enough away to be considered a worthless chase in face of their next obstacle.

"Follow that ship," Ryder growled at Bumblebee's dash as he climbed into the driver's seat once the Scout had slowed down enough to make contact. "We are getting her back."


	5. Chapter Five: Origins

**Chapter Five: Origins  
**

Air acrid with the scent of oil and suffrage, _Justice's Wing_ was a thing of nightmares.

The ship was a derelict craft, one from the earlier times of Cybertron. Indeed, the ship was as old as the race itself. Many of the proceeding models were molded in the image of this one ship and its Sisters due to the stalwart strength and durability of them. Truth, the models were the origination of their race – the singular design a catapult for all that was to come.

Samantha had never once been on this ship in her mortal life, possibly never been on it as the Allspark before their unity into one Being, but she knew of it intrinsically. The screams of appropriated enemies and mutinous ex-comrades echoed seamlessly with the hissing of hydraulics and clanging metallic plates.

Lockdown alternated between squeezing her carelessly and gesturing sedately with the servo that clutched her so threateningly. Distantly she was aware of Optimus Prime trying to reason – at first – with the bounty-hunter and then demanding her freedom. Each and every time she was aware of him being dismissed with cruelty. More to the point, she was aware of the pain being inflicted upon her in retaliation for his words by their captor.

Prison cells bordered their immediate path. Each cage housed various entities. Some were Cybertronian while others were something else entirely. The ones that were Hers, the ones that the Allspark called out for, she ruthlessly blockaded from her psyche. She couldn't allow them entrance into her soul. Not now. Not when so much was at stake.

Drones dragged the Prime before them, their processors a blank slate. Awareness had been wiped from them. It was an old and barbaric practice that had her stomach threatening to revolt.

 _Make it stop_ , she cried piteously in her own mind as she was strangled once again.

The room they entered was in actuality a suspended platform, rounded by revolving and gyrating rings. The cages that lined this particular platform were massive in size. Nearly large enough to contain Astrotrain comfortably. A single portal was open and her Prime was being dragged right to it.

Lockdown dropped her close to twenty feet to the ground below. Her agonized state disallowed her from coordinating a smoother landing than she managed. While she was successful in ensuring that her feet struck first, her knees were in no shape to hold her weight without buckling. The reinforcement her nanites had given to her fragile human form was the single thing that saved her from broken femurs. As it was, she crumpled backwards, striking her injured side against the gritty metal floor.

A sob worked its way from between her lips. Her shoulder wasn't merely broken, she knew. It was shattered probably beyond repair.

"Quiet, Insect. You are distracting me." Lockdown reprimanded her with cold finality. Through teary eyes she watched him hook a barbed claw into Optimus's ped and toss him legs first into the opened cell.

"Why are you doing this?" Optimus raged, his systems still shut down and out of his control. Lockdown got into his faceplates while barbs erupted from the cell walls to further incapacitate the Prime. He could move, but only with severe risk to his frame.

"You and your infernal meddling in the lives of other species. The Creators do not like this mingling of the species." He chuckled darkly. "We were not born, Prime. We were created. You were made to serve and you will be returned to the Creators to do their bidding."

"He's not theirs," she spat out hotly, misting tears in her eyes. Her body shook as she attempted to rise. "He is mine. _Mine_."

"Possessive little cretin, aren't you?"

Her whole body jolted violently at the sound of that voice. Turning on the shaking limb she rested on, she gaped at the swaggering James Savoy. He was accompanied by three other human males and escorted by even more drones, these ones of average Cybertonian height.

"W-what?"

"Surprised? How nice to know that you aren't as omnipotent as we'd feared." He waved his hand negligently. "Nevermind that. Let's hurry along with this. Joyce and Attinger are waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

Nobody answered her. Instead, a deathtrap of a seat manifested from the center floor plating. Savoy stomped over towards her with a purpose. He hauled her bodily from the ground, her destroyed shoulder his preferred target, and flung her with force into the hard, mid-back chair. Meanwhile, Lockdown subspaced a device that she hadn't seen in her human life, but knew of as well as she knew of this ship.

"As agreed. The seed for the Prime and Primanar." Lockdown's voice rumbled all around them as he gently set the elongated black-metal bomb between the three human entourage.

Sam screamed as her shoulders were pulled back behind her violently, two callused hands setting her palms one on top of the other. In the next moment, a white-hot searing pain soared through her hands. Muscle, tendon, and bone broke way to admit the intrusion of something not too dissimilar to cable. Her scream came to a crescendo as the mass jutting through her palms snapped firmly against the seat of her chair. If she moved her arms even a millimeter, she would feel the dragging pain of her pierced appendages, not to mention the tearing of her already ruined shoulder.

"Make haste, human. Her connection could return at any moment and I need her secured for the trip." Lockdown hurried Savoy with a sour note to his rasping tenor.

Trying in vain not to heave her chest with strangled pants, Samantha watched with horror as the man moved in front of her. He knelt, grabbing another cable. She could visually confirm now that it was indeed a cable – one about an inch in diameter and menacing looking despite its inanimate state.

She had barely a moment to catch her breath when the dagger-tip – looking like a sadistic sewing needle for Paul Bunin – was jammed with ease through the muscle of her right calf. More screams. The needle slid through like a knife through half-melted butter. It dragged with it the cable, which Savoy in turn locked into the right leg of the chair by a means she was unable to see due to the stringent hold of the hand-cables. Her left leg suffered the same fate, though she managed to get a well-aimed kick in to the man's thigh before the deed was done.

Savoy rose above her, smirking darkly. Before she could muster up a curse, he backhanded her with a bloody hand. The backhand itself was paltry, but the effect of her jerking body against the cabled felt as though she were ripping her muscles out of her legs and hands.

"Been itching to do that for years now. Fucking alien scum."

"I'll kill you," she whispered, her hatred echoed by Optimus's shouts for retribution. Funny, but the larger cells holding archaic looking Cybertronians also emitted bugling war-cries. "I'll kill you."

"Enough! Silence!" Lockdown slammed Prime's cell door shut, the forcefield around it sizzling to life. He pointed snappily towards the way they had all come. "Leave my ship, Insects. I will not miss this filthy planet."

Savoy led the charge out of the chamber, his posture one of superiority. Internally, thoughts of dismemberment and slow, inhumane tortures cycled through her mind's eye. Her vision was growing foggy and she could feel blood draining from her limbs. In moments she would be out cold, a state of unconsciousness that would keep her from even devising a plan of escape in these dire circumstances.

"Your Allspark will return to you shortly, _Primanar_ ," he spoke the title as a curse, "but with these restraints I'm quite certain that there will be no Warping for you. Oh no, to do so would mean having the bindings ripping all the way through your fragile human tissues. You would be unable to walk or use your hands for the remainder of your life, though it is a question if your hands will operate sufficiently at this point in time. I suppose it does not matter. You will not remain alive once the Creators have extracted the Allspark from that fleshy form."

She was so dizzy. She could barely follow his words any longer. It didn't matter much, anyway, as he'd already begun to remove himself from the chamber. She sat mostly facing Optimus, his bright blue optics shining with utmost worry for her.

His voice was droning like a gnat in her ear.

"Son-of-a-bitch," she murmured before blacking out from the pain and blood loss.

* * *

Ryder fisted the Matrix between both of his hands, willing the irate piece of alien machinery to quiet.

"Can you shut that fraggin' thing off, fleshy?!" Crosshairs lurched back on the bridge overpass as the Matrix lashed out with a violent jolt of energy. The hairs on the backs of his arms stood on end from the, to him, minute electrical charge that surrounded him like a cloud. "We're trying to get them back and all that thing is doing is frying my circuits!"

"I don' know how tah control the damned thing, ya tin can!" His jaw tightened. He felt his muscles straining. There was something about the Matrix that wasn't quite right. It wasn't inanimate – just like Sam's Allspark wasn't technically unliving. He wouldn't call it a sentience, but there was something wholly aware within the Matrix of Leadership's core. A sense of kinship to it, a feeling of being One with it, had him feeling its anger.

Its counterpart, the Allspark, was suffering. _Samantha_ was in pain.

A bloodthirsty rage bloomed in his gut.

He'd kill that motherfucker.

"Easy," he soothed it while simultaneously trying to calm himself. "Calm down. Think clear. Go in wit' a calm head an' a firm hand."

The Matrix thrashed a bit more, the mechs around him keeping a wide girth while the thing sputtered and jolted. For a handful more seconds, the antique thrummed before sliding into a more subdued, though still hot, state of being.

" _Harbinger_ , _Death Knot_ , and _Gargantuan_ are readied for capture." Drift looked beyond the ship just before them. Ryder wasn't sure if the armed-to-the-teeth ships he was seeing, even bigger and more intimidating than this one, were manned ships or Cybertronians themselves, but they were formidable looking. Flying rapidly around them was Megatron and who he could only assume to be the Trine, Starscream, Thundercracker, and Skywarp.

"Mechs, you see that? Can you feel it?" Hound gestured at the Grid that circled the planet. Blue light fissured between the honeycomb patterns, cracks of artificial lightning rending the air around them all. The ground tremored minutely under their feet. "Ole Cybertron is pissed."

"Indeed." Drift's gaze swept from side to side. "Samantha is the core of all of Cybertron. She is the Allspark. She is All. Lockdown will not be able to leave the planet with Her. He will be torn asunder by the planet itself for daring to harm Her."

"Up you get, Ryder," Bumblebee spoke to him distractedly, his attention divided between the threatening planet and retreating ship. Ryder allowed himself to be lifted, latching onto the backplates of the Scout.

"Love me a bad idea," Hound chuckled in his smoke-rasped voice.

"All you ever have is bad ideas," Crosshairs taunted, mistakenly jumping up behind Hound into the side of _Justice's Wing_. The rotund 'Bot kicked the green mech in the faceplates in retaliation.

"You aft-sucking glitch!" The Sabatour swore fitfully, catching himself at the last moment on a scrap of jutting hull. He massaged his jaw slowly, the clinking of metal sounding suspiciously like a cracking jaw would on a human.

"Teach you to shut your vocals down, won't it, Crosshairs?" Hound, despite his bulky frame, scaled the behemoth ship with ease. Ryder gawked at the swift and easy movements of the potbellied mech. "It's rude to stare, human."

"Sorry," he apologized automatically, but didn't quit staring. He was a stubborn man when he wanted to be.

Their ascent and subsequent descent into the belly of the ship was a silent affair. Ryder remained affixed to Bumblebee for the duration of the trip. Despite having long legs, he was no match for the speed or agility of a Cybertronian. He was not a man to argue against help. It was a few and far between time when he allowed his manly pride to get the better of him. Be that as it may, he wouldn't like any of his hometown friends or colleagues to see him hanging from the mech's back like a baby monkey clinging to its mother.

 _Nope. Not gonna let any of those bastards lord that over me_.

The ship began a lurching ascent that had him struggling to keep his footing once he'd been released to his own two feet. The Quad turned this way and that, surveying their surroundings.

"This is your friendly airline Captain speaking." Crosshairs began chanting in a putridly upbeat voice, his right servo morphing into a beastly cannon as he did so. "We would like you to be aware of bone grinders, brain blinders, flesh peelers, chromosome converters, catatonic sludge, blackholes, trapdoors, and of course radiation. We wish you a safe trip and happy landing."

For one stagnant moment Ryder glowered at the trenchcoated automaton before he growled out, "I see now why Sam has such a hard time wit' ya. Ya kinda piss me off."

"He does that to everybody." Drift supplied sagely. Without turning his helm he sliced at a biomechanical tentacle that had been reaching between two blocked walls to grapple his neck. Green slime squirted from the appendage and a wailing shriek pierced the air.

"We have to hurry. We only have ten minutes before Lockdown attempted to propel this ship through the stratosphere. We do not want to be on it when the others engage." Hound grumbled.

"I'm more worried about what the Grid is going to do to this ship." The Sabatour shook his head quickly. "Cybertron has more power now than it has had since even the factions were first formed. It will obliterate this vessel as soon as the Primanar is free of it."

"If we've only got ten minutes, we need to move." Ryder spread his arms out wide. "Which way?"

* * *

 _Not here again_ , Samantha thought morosely.

She was back in that white-out realm in which she'd gone to when she'd died so many years ago. Glancing downward, she could see the distorted, water-color pastels of her shape. No form exactly – just a hazy waft of sedate colors.

It occurred to her that she may have just died again.

 _No, that's not right. I was in pain, yeah, but surely I didn't_ die _from it. Again!_

"You are correct, child-of-Mankind. You are not dead." Came the booming, Godly voice of the Other. With great restraint, she resisted rolling her eyes at him. He was as preachy and invasive as ever. A pleased chuckle echoed all around even as she turned to face him. "Your spirit has served you well, Daughter."

"I am not your daughter, bub." She waggled a finger at him even if it just looked like wisps of muted colors waving back and forth on crisp parchment. "Why am I here, oh exalted one? Just like last time, I have something rather important to get back to."

"You forget yourself, Daughter." A blast of power rocketed through her, knocking the breath from her lungs. Without thought she retaliated, slinging her own power back on the whiplash of his strike. His colors flared hotly and there was a sense of mingled surprise and pride, but the lack of further reciprocation was appreciated. It was taking her too long to shake off that incorporeal hit. "Very good. Your tongue is loose, but you were born for the Allspark as it was made for you. Your human quirks are unexpected, but amusing."

"Excuse me?" She was panting a bit, but had managed to regain some semblance of control. It was humbling in a way to be outmatched by another…and frightening. Never once had the Allspark's power allowed her to be the underdog. Even if her human body crippled, that power prevailed against all.

But not the Other.

"Excuse what, Daughter? You must be specific in your questions." Privately, she thought that he was one to judge. If nothing else, he was a riddler of the highest caliber. He had never spoken to her in anything but riddles since she'd first been 'introduced' to him.

"How could the Allspark have been made for me? The Allspark is as old as the Cybertronian race. I'm barely a speck on the space-time continuum!"

"Time is relative, child-of-Mankind. You came into existence at the Allspark's creation, but separation was needed for the betterment of All. Time divided you for you to become One."

 _Where's Batman when you need him? The Riddler is running amuck._

"Who are you?" She asked instead of voicing her displeasure in the Other. It would get her nowhere.

"I am the First. I am one of the Creators." Her gasp was audible, and quite loud, in the white void around them. Delight tickled her from his direction. "Yes, Daughter, I am one of the origin species that made the Cybertronians. We have gone by many names, but Creators is simply the most recent and widely-known monikers."

"If you're one of them, why are you talking to me? Helping me?" She stiffened internally. "I'm not giving them up to you! They're mine!"

"They are yours," the Other agreed calmly, his form growing in size and depth of color. He grew until he consumer her whole vision. "See, Daughter, what you must. Our time is short and there is much for you to know."

Samantha gaped in wonderment as his once-hazy colors condensed into solid, moving shapes. Instead of solidifying to form a single entity, he divided himself into a plethora of varying patterns. For all intents and purposes, she was looking into a pseudo play. A recording of sorts.

In the scenescape before her, she could see the Creators. They were – grotesque. It was the only word she could think of. They were taller than a human by a good foot or two, their bodies elongated and the color of marbled meat packaged under translucent skin. Their fingers were as long as her whole hand from palm to fingertip, the tips sharper than a human's. Their feet were skeletal at best, the toes as abnormally long as their fingers. Proportioned in a macabre way, but still quite disproportioned to anything she'd ever seen before.

Their faces…she instantly thought of Phantom of the Opera. The LaRoux version. They had what the book called a 'death's head'. Their translucent skin and veiny pink and off-white musculature hugged their skulls tightly. No lips and jagged teeth. The hollows of where their eyes should have been were inky black pools. She felt as though she could toss a coin into them and watch the rippling waves crash against their eye-sockets. Their noses were but a flap of holed skin over where the orifice should have been.

They had no hair and wore singular robes that looked vaguely similar to long ponchos. Beyond that they were unadorned. Physically she could discern no difference between one and another.

They lounged with languid grace upon thrones of liquid metal, watching as mindless machines given vague humanoid shape fought relentlessly with each other. The titanic beings waged wars with each other at the bidding of their Masters. For their part, the Creators simply observed. They did not take part other than to point at the next opponent.

"Why?" She croaked out loud, eyeing with horror the alien bloodbath being displayed in frightening images. "Why would you do this?"

"Boredom." The response was instant and harsh. It felt like a physical offense to her ears. "What you now know as the Cybertronians, we once used as playthings. My kind does not age. We do not die except by cataclysmic event…or by our own hands.

"We evolved past the point of procreation. With eternity stretched out before us, there is no need to bare offspring. It is unfortunate that with countless lifetimes to better ourselves and the universe around us, we saw only the endless stretch of time and what it would bring. Boredom and heartache weigh heavy upon the soul. The machines we once used to create, we turned to destruction. In destruction we found momentary joy."

"That's so _wrong_." It was a hiss of denial and she felt her whole body shudder with revulsion.

"It was wrong, child-of-Mankind. And I was one of the few who saw this." The flashing images of war-torn battlefields ceased immediately and reconfigured to a single Creator who looked no different than any of the others before him. Or maybe it was a her? Or an it? Did they have a gender? Offhandedly she thought they didn't. She knew for a fact that the Cybertronians themselves were genderless, so it stood to reason that the beings that created them had no gender as well. How could you create something you knew nothing about?

The single Creator hovered over a suspiciously familiar device. The object was no bigger than a medium-sized suitcase, but the burnished metal and glyphs etched across its exterior were unmistakable. When sparks of blue light flared around it, Samantha knew for certain.

 _It's the Allspark_.

"My kind was on the brink of extinction. We knew it, but there were so few willing to search out answers. I could not go gentle into that goodnight." Someone has read Dylan Thomas, apparently. She did not remark so. "It took me countless years to create the Allspark. So long, in fact, that my kind consisted of no more than a hundred living beings remaining."

Her heart hurt for that. It truly did. For an entire race of beings, ones that were capable of wondrous things – even if they did not do great good with their abilities – to dwindle off into obscurity was sad. Unthinkable, really.

"The Allspark I made to harness all forms of energy surrounding it. I brought it into being with the notion of collecting the tattered remains of our civilization, our machines, and imbuing them with life. Ancient colleagues of mine, thirteen weathered souls, helped me to gather the machines and present them to the Allspark."

Here now she could see fourteen Creators standing before the Allspark with fourteen offlined frames of derelict humanoid war-machines. The Allspark shuddered violently before a great light encompassed the fourteen. Screams could be heard. When the brightness died away, there was nothing but ash remaining of where the Creators had stood and the optics of the machines glowed a brilliant lavender hue.

"You…you became a Cybertronian?" She stuttered at the scene. The largest of the beings, a titan of a mech with a golden, sweeping crown upon his helm and matching 'goatee' assessed the others. His helmet swept back and high, giving him the appearance of a Regent. He and the others were made up of jagged spikes and sharp sloping panels. They were what the Fallen had looked like…ancient metal scarred and burned many times over through the ravages of time. Where the Cybertronians she knew were more 'modern' in design, these were the originals of their species.

"Myself and my Dynasty. For thousands of years, with the aid of my Allspark, we were able to reanimate the decaying remains of our crumbled society. At first we released the programming in the frames to allow for freedom of movement and thought. With time and ample supplies of energy, free will began to emerge. The Allspark, to my great surprise, was able to collect the intricate patterns of energy which make up a being. With a proper amount of time and the body in which to imbue it, the Allspark was able to create _life_ in the frames of our machines.

"It was merely our intent to carry on the legacy of our people, the one which we shunned for our own selfish purposes, by allowing the machines we'd used to destroy to live on their own terms. We hoped that they might advance enough to create homes for other species or save a race from our same fate by being their protectorate. Instead, the Allspark imbued them with _true_ life. Souls of our deceased brethren and many more were funneled into the animated shells of our machines."

"They forgot their old lives, though." She filled in gently, watching as thousands of automatons gathered in recently built spaceships to return to the destroyed home world of the Creators. "The Allspark told me that much. When a soul comes back with no memories, I think it's for a fresh start unencumbered by their choices in a past life."

"Very astute, Daughter."

Suddenly, it occurred to her just why he called her 'Daughter'. He had created the Allspark and she was now One with it. In part, she existed because of him. Before she could comment on it, he'd continued.

"We returned to my home world after many eons. Our wars had brought it to ruin. However, with the Allspark's power I was able to enter into the planet's core and set a tactical explosion of one of our oldest technologies."

The big mech, the Other, Warped into the core of the planet surrounded by stored-up energy of the Allspark. The molten core didn't so much as touch the gunmetal frame of him. In his free hand he held a sinister, familiar object. A seed.

The seed detonated and created a chain reaction the likes of which she had never seen. Liquid metal fissured outwards in waves, hardening immediately thereafter. Water masses morphed into pulsing pools of raw Energon, crystallites forming in some cases where previous inclement weathers shifted it through phases. From watching it play out before her, she would have never known that the cyberformation of the Other's home world had taken nearly a decade. She knew only by the brief flashes of a chronometer upon one of the ever-orbiting ships that such time was passing.

In its final moments, she watched with fascination as the Other curled around the Allspark tightly. Like before when the Creators had been transferred into their metallic bodies, a blinding light encompassed him. From far away, Sam felt a thrumming awareness of Cybertron resonate within her whole body.

When the light dissipated, the Allspark and the Other were gone.

"With the Allspark I was able to join my soul to what you know as Cybertron. A piece of myself, a bit of my consciousness, absorbed into the Allspark. With it, I could always be connected to my people just as it was connected to their souls." He hummed thoughtfully. My Dynasty ushered our people, the newly-formed Cybertronian race, into a new age upon Cybertron. With their guidance, we would come to know benevolence and contentment. They knew of the mistakes of our past and would prevent our young from walking down the same road."

"But they didn't." She shook her head forlornly as the scenescape distorted and shrunk, returning to the hazy image of the Other. From this point forward she'd been well aware of the downward spiral of his race. "The Allspark needed more energy to continue to aid the Cybertronians in survival and only your Dynasty knew how to gather more. They couldn't be on Cybertron and harvesting suns at the same time. As children tend to do, they venture out on their own and make their own ways."

"You are correct. The Allspark divided itself early on in Cybertron's formation and provided my Dynasty with the Matrix of Leadership. It afforded them a connection back to Cybertron, but it was not enough to maintain serenity for long." He sighed very deeply. It was startling that such an alien creature could emote so similarly to a human being. "It grew only worse when my brother, Megatronus, divided from his fellow Primes. The Spark-deep need to see to the continued existence of our kind warped his processors. It mattered not who suffered so long as we would see until the end of eternity again."

"Why am I here?" She asked tiredly. As fascinating as all of this was, as much as she delighted in knowing the origins of her Cybertronians, she knew that she could not remain in this plane indefinitely. She was needed back in her body. Whatever amount of Creators were still left, be it one or one hundred – though they'd been reduced to less than that if the Other's story could be taken as full truth – she needed to stop them.

The Cybertronians were no longer their mindless creations. They were not toys to be played with. They were them…the future they hadn't known to be possible. She could not let them destroy the lives of the ones they used to be.

"You have always been here, Daughter."

"Ugh!" She wanted to throw something. "You've been so informative up until that little tidbit. No more riddles. Straight answers, buddy-boy."

"I tell no riddles. You simply do not hear." He was smiling condescendingly at her. She just knew he was! "You and the Allspark are One. There is no it without you. You told me so all those lifetimes ago."

"I told you? How could I tell you?" She waved her arms harshly in the negative. "You are out of your damned mind!"

Things were beginning to swirl around them. She was becoming aware of pain in her extremities and shoulder. The Other drifted in and out of her sight as a whirlwind of _everything_ seemed to hit her at once.

"You will be changed, Daughter-of-Mine. When you return, you will be changed and we will meet."

"Wait! Wait!" She cried out, grasping at nothing but air. Had she been in her in-the-flesh body, the maelstrom she found herself immersed in might have made her toss her cookies. As it was, she was completely off balance and dizzy. She reached for the Other, needing to know one thing…

"What's your name?"

She was dropping. Dropping back into the waking world. Power was crashing down through her, funneling in from the Other. His colors solidified above her even as she was pulled unerringly away from him. To begin, he was in his first body, the one of the grotesque Creator, and then he was his Cybertronian self. Regal bearing and statuesque features. Golden crown and gunmetal frame.

His wealth of power flowed into her with the surety of a river into the open sea. Her skin fairly prickled with heat. She felt something shifting under her skin, shocks of electricity lighting through her very veins. For the first time in years, vision bloomed in her blinded eye.

He smiled at her.

"I am called Primus."

Samantha Witwicky, Primanar of the Cybertronian race, Allspark in truth, screamed as her body convulsed upon the imprisoning chair as a riotous change overtook her body. Beyond her, Optimus Prime gaped in wonderment.

Even further beyond, Primus beamed in peace.

The time had finally come.


	6. Chapter Six: Fate and Luck are Fickle

**Chapter Six: Fate and Luck are Fickle Things**

Ryder eased his way, slowly, towards the convulsing woman pinioned to the chair in the center of the cavernous prison. The Quad, too, moved with measured, cautious steps. The chair was affixed to the flooring solidly, but it was shuddering with the force of its occupant's movements.

"Sam?" He whispered, his eyes wide and his chest tightening.

The Matrix, which had been thrumming up against his chest in agitation ever since they'd entered the ship, snapped off of its self-made chain to zoom towards her. The air crackled with energy as a high-pitched whine rent the air around them. The woman's head knocked back, her mouth gaped open, as she keened. Loudly.

As he watched, her already glittering golden skin took on a brighter sheen. He squinted his eyes, taking note of the minute shifts of light across her skin. No – it _was_ her skin. Her dermal layer literally rippled. Plating a fraction of the diameter of an eraser-tip shuddered under his unwavering gaze. The plates connected and moved in a pattern reminiscent of dragon scales, but unnoticeable in the moments of stillness when the Primanar did not express her obvious pain through physical movement.

Beneath that external layer rose vivid blue lines that were reminiscent of veins. Those lines ran across her arms and beneath her clothing. Some he saw creeping up under her hairline. Her body shuddered in the chair as the cables which had previously pinned her down sizzled and dissolved at the points in which they entered her body. They clanked against the metal flooring even as she stood onto her feet.

Her head tipped forward for the barest of moments before she lifted her face to his gaze. He stepped back once in shock. Her eyes were both a bright, shocking lavender hue. Both pupils were opaque, but her own attention on him was unwavering. She could _see_.

"Sam?" He inquired once more, his feet carrying him very slowly towards her. She was shaking and her skin was still undulating, but she didn't appear to be in pain any longer. That on its own relieved much of his worry. The ghostly sheen to her eyes unnerved him a bit, however.

"Release Optimus," she commanded the stoic sentinel behind him. Her voice brought goosebumps to his own skin. There was another power in her voice. Something other. Infinitely powerful. He had heard it before on occasion when she ordered the alien titans around as though they were unruly children, but it now echoed around her and through her. Every syllable resonated with it. "We must go."

Her eyes met his own and there was a flash of blue and red that spiked through her irises. He was mesmerized.

"Come with me, Ryder. We must release the prisoners on this vessel." Her feet were soundless as she made her way towards him. The Matrix followed her dutifully. As he watched, her 'crown' materialized. The pure Energon crystals were glowing as brightly as her eyes were. A slight smile touched her lips as she neared him and his heart raced fractionally. "You lost this. Let me give it back to you."

The Primanar held her hand aloft and palm upwards. The Matrix buzzed audibly as it lowered itself into the stretch of her palm. Her fingers curled into the tiny slits of metal, her fingernails pressing into the blue warmth of its own power. A hum dribbled from her lips.

Knowing nothing else to do, he reached forward to reclaim the object she offered. It was hot, narrowly scalding, in his hand as he raised it to his neck once more. The 'chain' remade itself without any notable prompting and locked itself to his neck. The woman's smile was disarming.

The finer hairs on the back of his neck began to lift as she stared him down with a regal gaze. He'd never felt so insignificant in his life.

* * *

Samantha brought both of her hands up to cup either of Ryder's lightly blushing cheeks. The previous injuries in her hands were gone – in a manner of speaking – and replaced with wells of untamed Energon. Her skin felt different. It was more sensitive now, yet stronger. The platelets that made up her external layer were settling. A translucent set contained the burning, viscous liquid to the center of her palms as well as the veins of it piping up and down her extremities. She could feel dozens of them congregating at the back of her skull and boring down into her brain.

She felt caught in a livewire of sorts. Her body was energized to the brink of pain, but it was dissipating into the realm of nothingness that was subspace. It was there, ready to come at her barest of whims, and fully capable of leveling the entirety of a planet with a singular wave of its magnificent power.

"Ryder," she murmured, pulling him down even as she raised onto the tips of her toes.

His burly frame shuddered under her touch. She breathed him in, relishing in the scent of him. With it, too, came the feelings of oneness. Just as Hunter had been hers all those years ago, she knew without a shadow of a doubt that Ryder belonged to her. She knew herself to belong to him. A soul-deep awareness had erupted with the revelations of the Other and the Cybertronian race only minutes before. For all she had understood before, she now had clarity and depth. She _knew_.

A smirk worked its way onto her face as Ryder groaned.

There was a piece of herself in him. She felt that now. She felt it through the ultra-sensitive pores of her platelets. She could feel the difference of him in the air. When she had saved Hunter and given him a transfusion of her own nanites, those microscopic entities had changed him as they had changed her own ancestor all of those years ago. They then passed down through his genetic line to Ryder.

And his presence around she and the Allspark was altering him as surely as it had altered her.

"We don't have much time. Come." She released him then, turning her eyes to the mechs. She could see them with both of her eyes now, though the eye she'd previously been blind in saw an abstract spectrum that made her feel a little off-kilter. Unable to verbalize the difference in any other way, she amounted the two to putting a set of lenses up to her eyes – one lens was 'normal' and the other was a kaleidoscope.

"Hurry." Inwardly she opened a wide channel with the comms. :: Now isn't the time for questions. Release the dropship. We'll meet you outside of the city. ::

She gave no opportunity for questioning or disobedience. Sam hurried past Ryder and down the next corridor. The male was hot on her heels. She was compass-North to him now. She empathized and sympathized with what he would be facing as his life from this day forward, his existence longer and grander than he ever could have dreamed possible. A part of her, the remembered parts of her own youth, pitied the woes he would face. He had no family left – not like she had – to mourn over losing to the ages, but his simply 'human' life would be no more. She knew loss very keenly indeed and deep down hated that she was the reason that he was the way he was. She'd altered Hunter – infected him with her vitality – and in doing so she'd condemned the blood of his kin to suffer her same fate.

 _Best not think on it now_ , she chided herself tersely. She satisfied herself with the knowledge that she would help Ryder in any way that she could. Just as the Cybertronians never allowed her to face her future alone, she would offer the man no less than she had been granted.

The imprisoned creatures, known and unknown to mankind, rattled unceasingly in their cages. Those of Cybertronian descent she latched onto with the Allspark ruthlessly, demanding obedience and loyalty. A few struggled against the waves, the ones that had forsaken honor and faith centuries ago, but she was ruthless in her pursuit. With audible groans she heard them succumb to the bonds. Those that didn't fight cheered loudly, stretching their struts and servos through in an effort to touch her.

"Quiet," she hissed verbally as well as through the comms. "Lockdown doesn't know we've escaped yet and I'd prefer to keep it that way."

"How are you planning to free the prisoners? How do we know that they should be let loose, anyway?" Ryder skirted away from a muddy brown colored alien with wrinkled, scaly skin, four eyes, and tentacles for fingers. The thing belched in their direction, the gas escaping from its mouth vomit-green. It made both of their eyes water. A protective film slid down over her eyes beneath her eyelids. She could see perfectly through it, but it kept her eyes safe and clean from irritants.

What else would this final transformation do to her?

 _ **Forced entry. Data breach: initiated.**_ Her eyes closed as she sifted through the logs of _Justice's Wing_. While Lockdown had been its Captain for close to a millennium, the ship was eons old. It was one of the ships the Dynasty had used. Its databanks were expansive, intricate, and _old_. The ship didn't need its captains to enter data for it to infer a wealth of information on its own. As heralded as the _Ark_ or _Nemesis_ was, this ship was simply more than any other.

 _ **Long may She reign.**_

Beyond the initial breach, the ship readily supplied the data she required. The creatures carried within were captives of the previous Captain, a High Lord Fortress Maximus, before he'd been captured by the Creator that had put Lockdown into their service. The Lord – last catalogued by the ship as still being functioning – had trapped the prisoners in a time-loop to meet with justice on their own worlds. None of the biological creatures were long-lived enough for their crimes to have maintained through a thousand years of political intrigue on their planets, but their records were damning.

She couldn't allow them free on Earth.

The Cybertronians were 'easy' enough. Those detained by Fortress Maximus would answer to the Primes for their crimes and face due-punishment. The ones that resisted Lockdown and were imprisoned by the traitor automaton were, on the whole, innocent.

:: Prepare for capture. :: The order she sent on a broad-spectrum comm to the three ships' Captains and the aerial 'Bots and 'Cons circling Justice's Wing. Even further, she touched her awareness across the Grid. Cybertron was _livid_. She soothed it in much the same way that a mother would soothe its babe. She cooed and smothered it with warm, peaceful feelings. Even through the hull of the ship she could hear the great beams shifting and shuddering. It reluctantly fell into submission of her desires, acknowledging her greater reasoning.

 _ **Eject Arkor-Level cells. Encapsulation mode. Anchors: release.**_

There were wails of objection across the ship as the cells containing the Cybertronians she'd bonded closed tight, metal sarcophagi, and ejected from the ship. The anchors were a distraction against Lockdown noting the vibration of the ship as the cells were released.

"Sam, where are we goin'?" Ryder pulled her behind himself even as he tucked them both into a shadowed corner. One of Lockdown's drones was running towards the control-deck, its peds crunching loudly against fallen plates and beams. The ship was in massive disrepair and the ejecting cells were shaking loose all of the poorly maintained bits of walkways, walls, and hull. "What the fuck is yer plan here? I thought we were freeing the prisoners."

"Already taken care of." She gritted her teeth as she forced the Other from her voice. She could feel it simmering around her and in her. What Primus had finished in her made being 'just' her so much harder than it ever had been. "I need my Wing."

"Your Wing? What are you talkin' 'bout?"

"This ship is older than it appears." She hopped agilely over a fallen bit of scaffolding, her legs not hurting in the least from the barbs and cable Savoy had forced through her calves. "There are ancient tools and weapons on this ship. One of them belongs to me."

"Ancient?" Ryder was swift beside her, his physique impressive. He surveyed their surroundings almost as much as she did. His eyes, she noted, were beginning to glow. His transition was moving along much quicker than hers ever had. Perhaps it was because she'd already been through so much of the transformation herself when she'd infused her nanites into Hunter? Or maybe it was his close proximity to her as well as the Matrix thrumming around his neck? She would take time to research the matter once this latest travesty was handled. "If you're meanin' what I think I'm hearin', I don't know how tah take it. You tryin' tah tell me that whoever manned this ship before knew you were gonna come along? A human?"

"Not just manned it, Ryder. _Built_ it." She hurried around another corner, urging the big man to follow in her footsteps. Her skin faintly prickled the closer she got to the disguised weapons' room. "I was a known entity before the Allspark was even created."

"That makes no Goddamned sense!" He was growling in frustration now.

"I know." She shook her own head on a sardonic laugh at the whole mess. "I don't fully understand it myself, but I think I'm beginning to. There! That's the room we need."

They closed in on a room designed in much the same way that the elevated cell-chamber had been where Optimus and she were dragged. Several corridors dropped into the slightly depressed chamber, the long halls like spokes in an old-fashioned wagon wheel. The chamber was a room of worship and meditation. There were twelve statues, as tall as the beings they were mirrored after, braced against the walls. Some were 'holding' up the ceiling while others were poised with ceremonial staffs in servo. In the center of the chamber kneeled a replica of the Cybertronian she now knew as Primus, though his appearance wasn't entirely accurate to what he had shown her of himself.

"Sam, this looks like a place of prayer. You sure you got the right place?" Ryder arched his neck to look up at the fabricated optics of the centermost figure. The gems gleamed in the fractures of light peaking through the damaged hull. "This don't look like a weapons' room."

"It's not supposed to." She raised her hands and touched the blade of the broad-sword that Primus clenched between his servos. The blade thrummed and eventually sparked light as she pushed Allspark power into it.

"Ah shit!" Ryder backpedaled from the kneeling statue and performed a quick about-face as the floors shook and air hissed out at the juncture between the metal beneath them and the walls surrounding them. Weapons of every size and make lifted from gaps in the flooring, a retrograde electro-magnetic field the only thing keeping the artifacts aloft.

She gestured vaguely towards a weapon that Ryder would be able to use. "Take the blaster that looks like a split-sword with a crescent hilt. It shouldn't be too heavy. Projectile weapons such as that one were designed for the minicons to use."

"How do I fire it?" He asked even as he hefted the cybertronian metal. The blaster fit perfectly in his large hands as opposed to if he had been a smaller man. He pressed the curved hilt to his shoulder, sighting down the bladed 'scope'.

"You will it to fire." She tapped her chest in a representation of where the Matrix hung from his neck. "The Matrix will help you. That blaster responds to electronic pulses, not mechanical force. There is not trigger to release. Think strongly of firing it and it will do so."

Ryder looked to her for a moment before passing his gaze along the walls. A frown touched his lips. "There isn't another one for you."

"I have my Wing."

"You said that before. Where is it?"

"Hidden in plain sight." She smirked in a semi-evil manner even as she used another spike of energy to shatter the blade she'd touched before. The shards erupted outwards as though to tear them to pieces, but were halted in the next instant by a containment field that shuddered to life as soon as she willed the destruction of the blade.

Buried within the blade was a staff designed proceeding the conception of the Allspark. It was a long staff with an obsidian-sentio-metalicon – what humans called Transformium – core and veins of pure Energon crystals weaving through the long shaft. Upon each end of the staff rested a four-inch wide blade, the smooth sides embellished with more crystals in the shape of ancient Cybertronian texts. The blades themselves were made up of the same obsidian-sentio-metalicon. While the traditional protomatter was resilient and able to shift through phases, its obsidian counterpart was the single hardest natural or unnatural element in the known Universe. It had been shaped and sharpened over eons with the infinite energy of the Allspark. A chain of threaded protomatter and Energon crystals enabled Samantha to drape the staff across her back, the core shifting into itself and locking down so that blades wouldn't be cumbersome knocking or dragging against the ground or ceiling – provided either scenario was possible.

"That was made for you, wasn't it?"

"Yes." She shook her head at any further questions he desired to ask. She could see the curiosity brimming in his still glowing eyes. "Not now. We have to get off this ship."

"An' how do ya suggest we do that?"

A smirk tugged at her lips. "The path has already been made, good sir."

Ryder followed after her dutifully as she lead their way back out of the room. The corridors had become saturated with a sulfurous musk, a weight of dread settling along the dank metal floors. Sam felt the shift of the fine platelets on the back of her neck and arms – her new reality of once-fine hairs rising – and squinted her eyes as though that would enable her to see through walls. While her eyesight had sharpened considerably, her one blinded eye returned to functioning order, it wasn't enough to see through walls. She was reformed, but she wasn't invincible and omnipotent.

"What?" Ryder looked on over her head, one large hand slipping around to her front to brace against her stomach. It was a shielding and protective gesture. One that wouldn't help them now.

"Run," she ordered both he and herself firmly. The syllable had scarcely passed her lips when there came a distant shudder of metal striking metal. There was an echoed chorus of snarling growls. She could all but smell their rancid, acidic spittle in the air mingling nauseatingly with the sulfuric aroma of the sputtering ship. "Now!"

The kitten heels she'd donned when she'd first endeavored to sneak into KSI were kicked off in her rapid flight. One clanked over a gangway and plummeted well over a hundred feet into a hanging cage, its criminal inhabitant getting struck across its titanium-strong skull. Its alien war cry was lost behind them and buried beneath the pounding of blood in her ears.

Ryder kept up with her easily, his long legs eating up the ground at a breakneck pace. Her own speed was attributed to her so recent change, the cybernetic evolution of sorts that her body had been destined to undergo since before the human race existed. The man beside and slightly behind her would undergo his own change in time, but his human frailty was not as shocking or hindering as most. He was already altered by the nanites he shared with her. Time would see him as she was.

If they survived.

The sounds of the cyberwolves were gaining on them swiftly even as they rounded the furthest corner of the starboard side of _Justice's Wing_ was a little more than disheartening. Sam yanked hard enough on Ryder's arm to dislodge it – though she was grateful that it didn't – and ushered him between slats of a turbine. It was a tight squeeze for the larger-than-life human and she knew it would take the wolves a little extra time to claw their way through.

They were both panting when the sun's rays caressed against their skin once more. The anchors that had been released when the cells containing Cybertronians were ejected were tangled up in one of the newer, sturdier buildings of Chicago. All those years ago they'd remodeled Chicago, a total rebuild to make up for the annihilation brought upon it by Vector Prime and his Hoard, and it looked as though reparations would need to be made again.

"Come on."

"Ain't we goin' back to the others?" The male beside her surveyed the quintupled anchor cables dubiously. The stretch of them was long between the ship and where they were securely wrapped several times over around the building. Sam could see people inside on the upper floors still, gaping at the enemy Cybertronian ship tethered to their workplace. They undoubtedly had a means to leave the building, but were too stupid and curious to get their fleshy asses to safety.

"No time." She looked to the Grid thrumming ominously above them and the three allied ships awaiting detention. She hopped up onto one of the cables and began a brisk walk down the swinging line. Decades, no… _centuries_ of dance lent her nimble grace that even her new body wouldn't have granted her. She stopped to look back over her shoulder at her partner. He'd turned decidedly green around the gills. A snarky inner part of her snickered at his obvious aversion to heights.

Or at least to his fear of falling from the unstable ground.

"It's either progress forward or face what's behind, Ryder. I can say with confidence that you don't want to be in a one-on-one encounter with what's coming."

"Ah Jesus!" On a snarl, the big man hefted himself onto the cable strung a little lower and beside hers. That one gave him another set of cables to use as stabilizers for a large stretch of the 'walk'. He began to grumble loudly even as he steadfastly refused to look down. "Don't know why I can't just shoot the damned things. Fuckin' alien gun ain't worth shit if I can't shoot nothin' with it."

Sam chuckled softly despite the dire situation and called out to Ryder to be swift. Her own footsteps were light, but quick. They needed to move faster.

About halfway across their impromptu bridge, the cable she was standing on jolted violently. A screech poured from her mouth as the cable lurched and snapped upward sending her body sailing into the air. She felt a moment of weightlessness between her abrupt ascent and the equally sudden and unavoidable fall. Gravity sucked her down mercilessly, pulling at her unerringly. Her arms flailed as she scrabbled for another one of the cables. Her fingers sunk home between two of the bonded pieces making up each link and the jolt of her body wrenching against her shoulders was agonizing.

The cabled shook and flailed fitfully, the jarring making her teeth rattle.

"What in the world are those ugly things?!" Ryder shouted over the clang of metal, one hand firmly grasping the cable to his side while the other he fired off shots into the oncoming wolves.

"Cyberwolves," she hissed as she pulled herself belly-up onto the cable.

Cyberwolves were indeed ugly, nasty creatures. They were a practice in cyberevolution gone terribly wrong. A scientist before Shockwave's own putrid involvement in horrific experimentation had thought it to be a brilliant idea to cyberform a world with a parasitic cybernetic organism mimicked off of sentio-metalica. It had been fortunate that the most 'evolved' lifeforms on that singular planet had been a derivative of Earthen wolves. Of course, those wolves resembled a bastardized version of a canine spliced with a komodo dragon with a rippling spinal column fanned with vibrant 'fins'. The Cybertronian-made parasite had imbedded itself into the creature's very core and mutated it, turning it into a festering, rotted version of what had once been a fearsome, powerful beast.

They were still organic in nature, the alien armaments more like cybernetic add-ons than total assimilations, and thus couldn't be influenced by the Allspark. Nothing beyond calling the metal off of their bodies, which would mutilate the creatures to their cores and leave a bloody mess, could stop them. Well, nothing beyond the call to heel by their 'master' or being shot dead through the skull cavity.

Ryder fired off another shot, nailing one wolf in the hindquarters. It wasn't a kill shot, but it barreled backwards into one of the other wolves and sending it careening down off of the cables. Its yelping howl of rage as it plummeted reverberated between the tethered building and its neighbors.

"Smart bastards," she groused as the wolves remaining on the ship leapt onto the tension wires and began to chew through them. She pushed hurriedly to her feet. "Get to the building. These cables are going to drop like limp noodles."

His support cable forgotten, Ryder began to run full-bar towards the carefully manicured garden their cables hung only a few feet above. Sam leapt nimbly from the cable she'd been on as it went abruptly slack and began to swing into the reflective windows. Offhandedly she hoped that the idiots in the building still knew enough to back away from the falling debris before it struck. Ryder's knees shook a little in front of her as she landed behind him, but he maintained balance and kept moving.

Shouts of terror were ripped from both of them as their cable snapped loudly behind them. That weightless feeling was back and was just as putridly momentary as it was before. She was reaching for Ryder even before they had completely begun their fall.

Behind them, the _Justice's Wing_ took off into the distance, an ancient hyper-pulsion unit lending to a nearly faster-than-light source of travel that would see it across the world in the blink of an eye. She was certain, however, that Lockdown would have missed the dropship disengaging in the midst of the unit powering up. Lockdown wouldn't fight the three ships surrounding him and the Grid wouldn't let him leave in one piece so the hyper-pulsion was his only viable option to evade capture.

She flailed her arms reaching for Ryder and scarcely managed to snatch onto his belt loops as she pulled them into a Warp.

Two second of all-consuming nothingness, of total blackout and cold, and they reemerged.

Ryder grunted, cursed, and went limp as he fell face-first into the gunman's control seat of the Aerial Scutter they'd dropped into. She reached for the pulse point in his neck frantically, her stomach not lifting from its bottomed-out state until she felt its steady beat. She caressed his cheek as she stood above him, her legs bracketed wide over his trim waist. Two overlarge pivoting blaster controls beckoned her.

"Welcome aboard, Primanar!" Crosshairs called to her from the front of the Scutter, flipping them expertly to dodge a volley of photonic pellets steered their way. Bumblebee whooped above her and gave her a cheeky thumbs up.

"Get us the Hell out of here!" Grunting, she pulled back on the controls to load with her whole bodyweight before punching them back forward. She couldn't give a controlled shot, but she figured that a steady stream of supercharged pellets, each powerful enough to blow up a five-bedroom brick house, would eventually strike one of their tails.

The heat from the kickback was intense and she knew if she had had any unaltered facial hair before, had she been entirely human, she would have singed it off. Her hair whipped around and behind her like a billowing cape.

Her bare feet slid and skidded on the flooring as Crosshairs swung them left and right, Ryder's unconscious, heavy body jarring her periodically as it was jerked around beneath her. One of Lockdown's drones was stupid enough to grow too close to them in his own Scutter and 'Bee took the initiative to hoist a tugboat up and over the ship to catapult into the enemy. Sam blanked out the explosion, the lenses under her primary eyelids flashing closed for a moment to protect her pupils from the bright flash of erupting light.

"'Bee! Take the controls." Crosshairs tugged the Scout by his dorsal wings to urge him into the driver's seat. The green Saboteur spared her the briefest of glances before dropping his goggled visor over his optics. "I'll meet you with the others."

 _Showboating_ , she thought with a mirthful chuckle in her head. A part of her knew that she'd become somewhat jaded in her centuries of life, but to laugh at war and destruction was so…vile of her. She hated how she was some days. She despised what she had become. Fighting was a necessary evil to maintain peace and to ensure a peaceful future for the civilians of both of their worlds, but she knew she shouldn't get a rise out of it as she did.

 _I need to sleep. I need to turn all of it off for a while_. She thought this to herself privately even as she continued to fire on their pursuers. She stuck another one sending it careening into a commemorative statue of a long-dead senator that had fought for – and won – the legal use of marijuana in the continental US. The statue and its base were reduced to miniscule granules of marble and concrete. _I need to get myself back. I need to find_ me _again_.

Ryder was groaning back into consciousness when Bumblebee ducked them down into an underground byway, the single remaining Scutter trapping itself right in her line of fire. Four point-blank shots sent the drone's eviscerated frame in every direction around the forward nose of the Scutter. The fighter ship itself bounced twice against the asphalt before spinning over the retaining wall and into the open drainage system.

"What's goin' on?" Ryder's head peeked up from below, his body rising under her. She yelped uncontrollably as his considerable bulk pushed up against her thighs and sent her pin wheeling backwards. Her yellow Guardian performed his own pinwheel by raising their Scutter up and out of the ground by plowing through the street above. The front of the Scutter took the brunt of the hit, but their tail end was dislodged and sent rolling topsy-turvy down the busy street.

Sam used her legs to lock onto Ryder while her arms twined into hydraulic piping beside the enormous seat. Together they grunted as their relatively fragile bodies crashed around in the confines of the gunman's control seat. When it came to a shuddering end, Sam felt her body go boneless as she slunk against the tilted sidewall.

"Remind me to never come with you again on one of these adventures," the man grumbled as he attempted to untangle himself from disrupted wires nearby. She noted that he had a small cut on his forehead that was already bruising nicely. His lips were pursed in displeasure, but his gaze was sharp and assessing as he looked her over visually. "You okay? Hurt?"

"I'm fine," she assured him lamely.

At that moment, Bumblebee peeked up over the lip of the cockpit. He whirred in distress, his anxious chirping and clicking telling her how shaky he was over this latest episode. She didn't doubt that it was primarily caused by her abduction and brief torture by her own kind on that ship.

His blunted digits reached inward and carefully scooped her up so that he could cradle her against his chassis. She was limp as he did as he wished with her body. His helm was bent over her studiously, his internal comms banging against her mind in an effort to communicate without threat of being heard. She ignored his inquiries and instead luxuriated in the warmth he radiated.

Offhandedly he helped Ryder down to the battered ground before transforming around her. The seat she found herself nestled into was one she dreaded, but adored at the same time. It was her 'Allspark-carseat' as she had affectionately dubbed it. It resembled a baby's carseat in that it had little padded buffers on both sides and a total over-the-chest harness that would keep her comfortably in place. The seat made her feel like a baby whenever she thought about it too much, but the comfort and warmth it provided was unparalleled. All of the mechs and femmes capable of an appropriately sized alt knew and mimicked this exact configuration if she wasn't feeling entirely well and traveling within one of them.

Ryder slid in on the passenger side, his eyes widening at first in surprise before a gentle smile touched his lips to see her snuggled up so soundly in the seat. 'Bee forcefully buckled the man into his own seat when he didn't reach for the belt, but his eyes remained trained onto her.

"You sure you're okay?"

"Just tired." She stretched her limbs a little and winced. "And achy, too."

"How long until we reach the others?"

She smiled faintly at the carefully phrased question. "Not long enough to take a nap." She turned her head and reached out for him, pleased when her Guardian lowered that side's buffer so that she could see him and speak to him clearly. His larger hands pinned and engulfed herself. "There's something we need to talk about, Ryder. Something important."

"I'm changing, aren't I?"

She was startled into silence by his astute assessment and gaped like a fish out of water. It wasn't often that she was struck speechless anymore. The man smiled at her with kindness and released one of his hands to knock her chin back up with a crooked finger. Once she'd snapped her jaw back closed he returned his hand to where it had been, though it slowly began to meander up and down her arm to rub soothingly across her new skin.

"Ole Grandpa Hunter told all of his kids 'bout you. 'Bout how you saved him. That's one of the stories that was never forgotten in my family." His calloused fingers caressing her skin made her shiver in a good way. He saw her involuntary reaction and smiled brighter, a twinkle coming into his iceberg eyes. "Then you told me a bit about what happened to you. I don' know all of it, a'course, but I can infer enough. What happened to you from those nanites is happenin' to me."

"I'm sorry, Ryder." She reached across her body with her free hand to stop the petting. Her expression was earnest as she locked eyes with him. Lavender against blue. "I didn't mean for it to happen. I never thought it would. If I had…"

"You still woulda saved him." He shook his head when the denial was on the tip of her tongue. "You believe in destiny, sweetheart? Fate? Seems to me you're all wound up in it; wound up for the Cybertronians an' all us humans. And maybe we're all wound up in it. I reckon maybe I'm wound up in it for you. Your somethin'-great grandpa wasn't meant to be totally immersed in this war himself, but I think he was meant to hand it all down to you. My somethin'-great grandpa Hunter had a piece of it – and you – but maybe he was meant to hand it down to me, too."

She pursed her lips tightly together, unwilling to lessen Hunter's role in her life. It was also in an effort to keep the words of affirmation from bubbling up. It wasn't as if she hadn't thought about the very same thing Ryder was expressing to her verbally now, but speaking it aloud made it too real.

Was Fate real?

"I ain't sayin' I'm not gonna be spittin' mad at times. I ain't sayin' that this is goin' to be easy for me, but what choice do I have? I don' think I have much more of one than you did, sweetheart." He leaned forward to peck a tender kiss to her lips. "The difference is, I'm hopin', that I have you right here with me."

Tears stung her eyes as she looked up at the handsome man beside her, unable to believe all that had happened. All that life had brought them both to.

"Will ya be with me, Samantha Witwicky? Cuz I don't think I can do this, whatever it is, without you."

She nodded her head slowly, but with surety. She squeezed his hands firmly.

"I'm with you, Ryder Mason. Come what may, I'm with you."

She just hoped that they both weren't destined to be sucked further into whatever Fate had in store for them…not so far as to where they would never be able to pull themselves out again.

* * *

 _Fifteen minutes later…_

The train yard was abandoned and overgrown with daisies and forget-me-nots. Sam sat in a particularly thick growth of them, the wind clean and caressing her cheeks as she looked down at Brains in her lap.

The defecto-drone was lay sprawled out on his back, his head cushioned by her hip. She kept her palm flat against his chassis and sent miniscule pulses of Allspark energy into his spark. The little mech was mostly drained of power, the virus he'd attained from the technician who'd commandeered him having wiped out his pour mainframe. She hummed lightly as she utilized the neural pathways in her mind, the ones made so much clearer from her transformation at the hands of Primus, to clear away the fractured and damaged data that he'd been unable to see to himself. She'd have him remain at the yard for a short time after they left before sending him off to meet Jetfire at a pickup location. The grump old jet would bring Brains to any one of the medics for care, though he'd probably be brought to Jolt since Wheelie liked to pal around with the electro-whip-happy 'bot more often than not.

The dropship they'd snatched from Justice's Wing had had its tracker disabled immediately and they were in the midst of making their final decision on how to proceed and when they were doing to roll out.

It would need to be soon. Cemetery Wind was getting closer along with a contingent of local troopers.

"Are you saying that Galvatron has control of all those new guys? And he's planning to what?" Ryder kneeled behind her and alternated between rubbing her shoulders and scraping his meaty hands through his hair. His tone was abundantly stressed.

"He's been biding his time until those dummies at KSI could get that seed Lockdown promised them." Brains shook his head in sheer disgust, the glowing blue fiber optics of his 'hair' sparking in his ire. He shook a servo in the air aggressively. "Dumbass squishies! Humans can't leave well enough alone. They had what they needed to make their own robots, but they couldn't stop there. Had to take control. Had to make their own version of Cybertronians sayin' they was doin' it for the good of mankind. Oil splatter!"

"Joyce is self-serving, but he's still an engineer. He would have gotten funding from the government, but he'd hate to see his creations used for war. He's a sellout, but he hasn't gone that far." Sam petted Brains' helm, her palm unscathed by the burning fibers.

Brains dismissed her words with a hurrumph, popping himself onto his peds so that he could pace. "They found pieces of Megatron, parts of him that were still tainted by the Fallen. None of those things has a spark like us, a _soul_ , but that Galvatron got a dark bit a 'Con programming in him. With the sun harvester long destroyed that thing is gonna make use of Earth in another way."

"The seed."

"What is a seed exactly?" Ryder glanced at her over her shoulder and then up to the mechs as they took to the podium.

"Back at the beginning of our race, there was a device known as a seed. It was a bomb that altered all biological and non within a ten mile radius of its detonation into sentio-metalica – what humans have called Transformium." Drift sneered at the word. "Our Creators, according to what little archives we have of such long-ago times, initially used the seeds to cyberform worlds to make the protomatter necessary in our construction. When the Creators disappeared, our own Primes used them on the planets which were left barren after harvesting their suns."

Samantha didn't know how much to tell the Cybertronians about their history. She didn't know what would be safe to tell them…or what would be safe for _her_. Could she tell them that Primus was indeed the first of them, but that he had first been a Creator? Could she tell them that they, in all likelihood, were the reincarnated souls of the fallen Creators?

No. No, she couldn't tell them these things. Not now. Possibly not ever.

She cleared her throat, picking up the story. "Earth was different. Maybe sixty-million years ago the seeds were used while our sun was still intact. From what the Allspark tells me, Earth was just a happy coincidence that the Primes stumbled upon while they were travelling the universe. Our sun wasn't ready for harvesting yet, but Earth was teeming with biological life that they could cyberform for immediate repairs on their vessels. They came back with the intention of harvesting our sun some eons later, but by that point the first evolved homosapiens had begun to skulk around."

"KSI has all of its prototype fleet past ninety percent completion in China." Brains continued on in the most recent events, the cause for their current troubles. "Joyce thinks they're under his control. Attinger thinks they're his guns. What those hairless apes don't see is that Galvatron has command of them all. Once he gets the seed, he's going to detonate it in Beijing where it'll cause the most casualties and devastation. He'll use those things to scrape up all the protomatter and make more soldiers. Systematic downfall of Earth."

"Joshua Joyce is already on his way to his factory in China." Optimus looked down at them with bright optics, his anger a living thing beneath the calm surface he maintained. She could feel it. "Galvatron and Stinger are being transported as well."

"We need to get there before Galvatron takes possession of the seed." Inwardly, she was rattling off orders to have several battalions on standby in the Asian continent. Regardless of what they did now, she knew that they would need all the help that they could get in the coming hours.

"How fast can that dingy get us there?" Ryder gestured with a hooked thumb over his shoulder at the dropship.

Hound guffawed in his scratchy deep voice, his servos coming to rest on his 'pudgy' abdomen. His muffler rattled from one side to the other in his oral cavity as though he were chewing on it.

"Kid, it's a spaceship. You ain't gonna get much faster than that."

"There hyper-pulsion in it?" She inquired curiously, brushing off her stained white slacks as she stood. The sound of sirens blaring in the distance keyed her in to the fact that now was the time to leave.

"Nah. That big momma had one because of its sheer size and age." Crosshairs swept his servos across his audios in a fidgety gesture. His expression, more readable like a human's due to the number and intricacies of the plates on his face, was wistful as he looked up at the hovering dropship. "Old fashioned space travel is all this is. Although Lockdown's gonna be hobbled for a few hours. Those units are handy, but they drain power like a hummertic to a zekle bloom. Even a dark matter drive will take time to recharge it for another go. With any luck we won't have to worry about that fraggin' glitch until after we deal with Galvatron."

As she walked up the ramp into the ship, Sam couldn't help but think that luck had been anything but on their side since this whole farce began.

She was a fickle bitch after all.


	7. Chapter Seven: Ancients

**Chapter Seven: Ancients**

"You probably shouldn't do that."

Samantha passed only the briefest of glances to her new companion before returning to her inspection.

She sat high in the rafters, heedless of the occupant in the cell beneath her and his nervous worry at her being so high, and picked at her new skin with a medic's scalpel. She'd found tools in the derelict medical wing of the drop ship meant for the more appropriately-sized drones and minicons. The room hadn't been maintained, many parts scavenged over the eons, and that wasn't to say that it had been well-equipped to begin with. Medical wings on drop ships were only purposed for bare-bones operations or emergency situations, the bigger and better stocked medbays on the main ships a crew's and medic's calling card.

Still, it had tools enough for what she deigned to tinker with.

"Lemme rephrase; I'm askin' you to please not do that." Ryder reached out to take the scalpel from her hand. "It unnerves me."

She yanked her hand – and the scalpel – out of his reach. She felt her eyes flare with heat and energy as she glared him down.

The big man sighed deeply before taking a seat on a rafter well above hers. She was perched in snapping distance of the cell's prisoner and while she was comfortable, she knew that he would not be. The Cybertronians trapped beneath where they sat and in the other cells were older than Optimus or Megatron. In truth, they were older than the old-timer Jetfire. They were some of the first of their kind. A part of the very, very few that had developed a sentience of their own separate from that of the reincarnated souls of the Creators.

She hummed as a devastatingly sharp talon, one larger than her whole body, caressed her calf with supreme gentility. She giggled as the tip of the talon scraped against the entire base of her foot. An involuntary kick had her toes clinking into yet another talon as the being beneath her rumbled joyfully.

He enjoyed playing with her too tiny, still too fragile body. Despite all of her body's changes, she would without a doubt splatter into a million pieces from the force of one of his servos pushing her into a wall.

That fragility enamored and endeared the titan to her almost as surely as the Allspark's power did.

"Why ain't these guys let out yet?" Ryder was timid when he gestured towards the behemoth contentedly playing with her feet. "If they're dangerous then why the hell are you lettin' them do that?"

"They'll unbalance the ship," she replied distractedly as she tossed a solitonic-regulator – a grapefruit sized piece of machinery meant to track and control energon flow within a Cybertonian's frame at the point of repair – at the being's head. He chirped with good humor and allowed the regulator to ping off of his red optic.

He tickled her foot again.

"Stop it!" She yelped when she nearly dislodged the platelet she was attempting to explore and gouged into the pool of pure energon in her arm. A hiss of pain slipped from her lips. She yanked the scalpel away, set it in her lap, and cuddled her arm to her chest protectively. The platelet throbbed as it resettled. "They're too big for this dropship. They know they'll tip us in our current heading and speeds so they're content to stay where they are."

"You okay? Want me to take a look?"

Sam peaked at the self-inflicted wound on her forearm, not surprised to see it already healed. The energon that had managed to leak out, however, would be dangerous to Ryder at present or toany other human. Energon was not a human's friend. Not as quick acting as sulfuric acid, but just as volatile.

"No," she groused, using her stained white blouse to wipe at the liquid. "I just wanted to see what I was made of."

She found herself screeching as a set of deconstructed forceps and grapplers latched onto her legs simultaneously and yanked. Sam scrambled for the rafter, another bar to the being's cage, instinctively. She missed.

"Shit!" She cried as she dropped into the massive palm of the ancient titan. More grappling tendrils latched onto her clothing while she wiggled under the talons that began to close around her.

"Fuck! Optimus!" Ryder was on his feet above her and scrambling to bring himself lower. "It's got Sam!"

She could hear the others scrambling towards the cell she and the titan were in, could feel their worry for her bombarding her through the bonds, and rushed to calm them. Even so, she goggled up at the red optics of the being holding her. He brought himself down to a crouch, his massive form shielding her from the others' views.

"I'm fine! It's all okay." She endeavored to calm her heartrate. The titan was still purring over her. He seemed unfazed by the threat of the others. In point of fact, she could feel that he wasn't worried in the slightest. He was…amused. He was cooing!

When she tried to shake the grapplers off they grabbed for her skin instead. She remained pinned on her back despite how she kicked her legs and flailed her arms. The titan's opposite talon reached into his cupped servo to tickle her stomach and pet against her cheek.

"Grimlock…share!" Came the snarled reprimand of one of the titan's cohorts. Strafe banged against his cell's bars. He was smaller than Grimlock, but not by much. He reached through the bars beckoning for her. The forcefields were a precaution she'd turned off once she'd realized who were in the cells and that they were no immediate danger to them, but was somewhat regretting now that they were going to pass her around like a favorite stuffed teddy bear.

"Grimlock's Baby." The Dinobot leader rumbled down to her, his servo raising and talons splaying out so that he could nuzzle his battlemask against her. His purr was loud enough to send a vibration through her whole body.

"Share!" Scorn reached for her now, too, his splayed and taloned feet stomping with irritation.

The Quad and Optimus stood dozens of feet shorter than Grimlock when he stood and the others weren't much shorter than their leader. The servos they held out were well above the traditional-sized helms of the Autobots. Grimlock passed her over to Slag with a final tickle to her bared feet and remained leaned against the bars as though to stay as close to her as possible.

"Allspark _baby_." Slag purred at her, the English word for sparkling a throaty rumble in his vocalizer. He tickled and caressed her much the same way as his leader had. She detected true warmth and a smile in him. "Dinobot's precious Baby."

"I am not a baby," she snapped at Slag as he chuckled happily at her.

"Baby hurt herself," Strafe snatched her from Slag as she was handed over, an intrusive scan thrumming over her body. She eeped. She had _not_ expected that! That scan had been intense and complex. While most Cybertronians had the ability to perform scans that could assess general health and stability, both in humans and on the things around them, only medical personnel had the deep-tissue scanners.

Strafe was a medic?

"Strafe take care of Baby." She yipped once as she was rolled onto her stomach in his servo and her already healed arm was pinned outwardly by the too-tiny appendages medics tended towards pulling out of nowhere for detailed repairs. The grapplers they'd all maneuvered her with, the 'limbs' branching out from between the plating of their palms and digits, kept her immobile as the appendages descended.

"Wait wait wait!" She pulsed Allspark energy into Strafe's servo in an attempt to shock him into releasing her, but Strafe outright bellowed in laughter. His free servo caressed her back lovingly. He didn't even flinch.

"Baby's pet fall. Grimlock help pet so Baby not upset."

Sam was sufficiently distracted from Strafe's meddling with her arm – it didn't hurt at any rate – to see Grimlock reach up with a more careless servo to snatch Ryder from the bar he'd been perched upon. The human was almost comically dwarfed by even one of the Dinobot's talons. Ryder shouted obscenities even as he was quickly maneuvered down to the ground and pushed with a big toe out of the leader's cell.

"I ain't no pet," the man grumbled as he straightened his shirt out.

"Baby's pet," Grimlock snorted before training his optics back onto her.

"I am not…a…baby!" She reiterated before wailing as something warm and metallic began to slither up over her legs. It moved quickly and silently to coast over her buttocks, then her back, before settling to make itself a home around her neck and into her hair. She felt the weight of her hastily-made braid – as her hair had regrown to its ankle-length sometime during her transformation – grow with whatever the thing was.

" _Kalisdahk_ help Baby." Strafe nuzzled her back before releasing her so that she could be transferred over to his final 'brother'. She heard the others below them vent heavily at whatever they saw. She was too busy rolling on the new servo to pay attention.

"Baby ours." Scorn rumbled, his battlemask instantly against her body. Unlike his brothers, Scorn's left arm was a spiked whip of sorts, the base of it widest at his shoulder and thinning out to a jagged point at his peds. He couldn't touch her like the others had, but he could still show his affections.

Sam shoved her foot into an engraved Cybertronian glyph in his battlemask and pushed. Scorn laughed, his hot venting puffing over her body. She fumbled with the thing caging her throat and tangling in her hair. It wasn't tight, but it was warm and she felt her own power pulsing through it. Her brows furrowed as she dug for the meaning to that word Strafe had spoken.

 _Kalisdahk_. An ancient Cybertronian talisman, a holdover from the Dynasty. It had been utilized as a protective carrier for the Allspark. It was capable of masking the Allspark's great power from those that sought it, but it was also a semi-living entity on its own. It was capable of harnessing the Allspark's power and converting it into an impenetrable shield. It enabled the Allspark to use its power to create or destroy with full focus without fear of it coming to harm.

 _But that Kalisdahk has been gone since before Megatronus-the-Fallen broke from the original Dynasty. How do they have it? Did they steal it from Fortress Maximus or was it the other way around?_

"Baby see pet now. Tiny warriors are nervous of Scorn with Baby." Scorn's red optics flared brightly at the assembled Autobots in censure even as he crouched to let her slide onto her own two feet. "Tiny warriors should know better."

Samantha hurried out of the cell. It wasn't that she was frightened of the Dinobots. No, far from it. She was afraid they'd scoop her up again and play 'pass the baby' until their joints rusted.

"Are you okay?" Ryder took her into his arms and held her close for several moments. She felt his hands skim her back inquisitively. She was the first to pull away far enough for him to look down onto her face. She jerked a nod. One of his brows perked up high. "You sure they're in there for stability's sake?"

"I didn't ask for an 'I told you so'." She shoved him away from her and turned with a huff. The others had very reluctantly gone back to their posts as soon as she slid through the wide bars of Scorn's cell.

"You're still gettin' one."

"Nobody likes a smartass."

* * *

"Mister Joyce," the accented voice of one of his Beijing secretaries brings his attention away from the labs below him. Attinger had just left the room to discuss more private matters with his cronies.

Fingers steepled in front of his lips, Joshua analyzed the situation at hand.

They had the Seed now. It sat beside him even now, the envoy from Lockdown's ship having arrive an hour after their arrival. In the next week he would be sending out a finite crew to discharge the Seed in the Mongolian desert away from innocents. They would have enough Transformium to keep operations going for the next five-hundred years or so. Of course, that was all contingent upon how deep the charge burrowed beneath the Earth's surface. Regardless, his plans were finally coming to fruition.

While he knew that the military, and Cemetery Wind to a large degree, would commission and commandeer a contingent of Cyclons – as they would come to be known – for their never-ending pursuit of war and strife, he also banked on the eighty-five percent of his creations propelling the human race out from under their Cybertronian 'neighbors'.

He could hear that woman – Samantha Witwicky – as clearly now as he had back in his Chicago headquarters. A total remodel now. She had said that the Transformers, her precious aliens, were alive. He didn't understand how that could be, but a niggling sense kept telling him to listen to what she had spoken so clearly.

"Mister Joyce."

How could a machine be alive? Not simply moving and adept at mimicry, but truly alive. Was it possible for a soul to exist within a metallic frame? It didn't seem probable or possible. Of course, if he gave it any thought, it didn't make any logical sense that humans had souls. What were they but an evolved mammalian species? They were hunks of bone, muscle, and vast amounts of tissue holding it all together. They had brains and other organs that allowed their bodies to function, but what sparked a self awareness in the human race? Where did their consciousness come from? What gave them a soul?

Was it so far of a stretch to imagine the Transformers as having souls the same as they did?

Beyond all that, he couldn't outright deny that the Transformers' home world crossing through that Gate hundreds of years ago hadn't helped the planet Earth. There hadn't been a single meteorological issue in centuries. The ground seemed revitalized. Forests were growing at an exponential rate. Wildlife was thriving. The waters of the Earth were cleaner than they ever had been before. He was a scientist. He knew that the Grid granted some benefits to Earth, but he suspected that the Spires drove deep down and cured their planet from the inside.

He disliked the Transformers for the simple fact that he saw them as competition to the human race. What would it take for them to be rendered as endangered as the rhinos of long-ago times before the assimilation of the two worlds? The Transformers were superior in almost every way to humankind. They were stronger. Faster. More intelligent. …and they had all but destroyed their own world in their wars. Humans were no longer the dominant species on Earth.

His inventions, his Cyclons – made from the very same essence that created the Transformers – would save the human race. They would be able to make greater strides on their own with the Cyclons on their side. They wouldn't have to ask for aid from the Transformers. They could build, grow, and explore well beyond where they had ever dreamed possible. There would be endless opportunity…

"Mister Joyce!" He startled, so thoroughly drawn into his own thoughts that he'd disregarded the aide. His brows furrowed at the sleek silver phone she held out to him. Her look was stern. "You have an urgent phone call, Mister Joyce."

"Who is it?" He asked even as he reached to take the device.

"Miss Witwicky."

"What?!" Joshua shot a look to the doorway, relieved to see that Attinger had skulked away to some dark corner somewhere. He didn't need the man overhearing this particular conversation. He waved off the aide. "This is Joyce."

"Keep the Seed away from Galvatron." So it _was_ her. He would never forget her voice. He'd heard it in school when he grew up as his history teachers replayed coverage of the Witwicky woman and the aliens she brought with her. Now, he'd heard it for himself. Hers was a voice that undulated with power. It was husky and smooth all at once. She had a voice that could bring men to their knees.

"How did you get this number?" Was his unintelligent question. He felt like bashing his own skull against the wall. He was thankful that she ignored the inane query.

"Assure me that you understand what I am saying, Joshua. Galvatron wants that Seed. You cannot let him have it."

"How are you still alive?" While he hadn't been aware initially that Attinger had sent out his hound Savoy to kill the woman, he had no doubt that the officer was certain of his success in annihilating his long-standing opposition. Attinger practically preened like a peacock when Savoy had called to state that the 'alien lover' was no longer an issue.

"Careful, Joshua. This call is being monitored. If they think you had anything to do with my kidnapping and torture, you'll be praying to every God out there for salvation." Samantha tsked him mildly.

"I wasn't privy to what happened to you until after. I am sorry." And he was. No one should have to face their own death as she had. Of course, he was beginning to wonder if he'd been the one to snuff out the lives of her precious Transformers in the same way in which Attinger had attempted to snuff her out.

He shook his head.

"Galvatron is under my control. He isn't a threat."

"What did I tell you before, Joyce? You don't have the power to do what you have been doing. Galvatron is tainted by something far stronger and far more dangerous than you can possibly imagine." He could hear her exhale loudly. "Galvatron is going to make an army of your prototypes. He's going to lay waste to Beijing, steal the Seed, and use it to destroy the world as we know it. You know I'm right. You know there is something in _your_ Galvatron that you can't analyze or control."

He did know that. It was the main reason he'd been so pensive about the Transformers to begin with. Galvatron _spoke_. He broke out of pattern. He acted _feely_.

That wasn't supposed to happen.

"We're coming, Joshua. We're coming and I hope to God that we're not too late." Silence for a heartbeat. "Do the right thing. Don't let Galvatron take the Seed."

Samantha disconnected without further word and Joshua found himself looking at the blank screen. He imagined he would appear shell-shocked or dumbfounded to anyone that might walk in on him. He knew he'd never be able to trace her call back; would never be able to open communication with her in return. His staff had attempted to make contact with her in the past. He'd hired the best hackers he could find.

The woman was as good as a ghost when she wanted to be.

"Congratulations, Joyce." Attinger returned to the room, his arms flailing out in exaggerated joy. "You finally have the Seed. Or should I say that _we_ have the Seed? When can we start mass production?"

Joshua rose from his seat as steadily as he could, his eyes trailing between both of the agents. Savoy had entered behind Attinger and comfortably seated himself in one of the vacant office chairs. Both men looked at him just as intensely, suspicion sharpening their gazes.

"It will take some time," he evaded as best he could.

"How much time?"

He turned to look through the glass wall and doorway into the frontal office. Su Yueming was yelling into the two-way intercom system, her precisely groomed tail jerking with her angry movements.

"I need to gather all of my collectors. I need dedicated personnel. I have to revamp security. It could take a while." Attinger stormed up behind him, fisting his hand into his designer suit jacket to thrust his around. Joshua felt himself thrown into the wall, warping the video playing as his body was smashed against the crystals beneath the screen. He looked up into the Cemetery Wind Commander's dark eyes.

"You backing out on me, Joshua? You understand that that would be treason against your fellow Americans?"

"I'm not backing out." A lie. "It will simply take time."

"Time we don't have. There are American lives at stake, Joyce. Your technology is imperative to the future of not only America, but our human race. The Transformers have plagued us long enough."

Su stormed into the room undaunted by the fuming agent manacling her associate's tie. She shoved between the two men, leaning forward enough to whisper in his own ear. "Your Galvatron activated himself."

Shit.

"Have a car brought around," he whispered back, his eyes locking on Attinger's narrowed ones. "Discreetly."

Su released him without another were, her fingers snapping for the attention of the security agents scattered throughout the front office. They scurried like good little worker bees to do her bidding.

"Change of plans. We need to move." He shooed his hands at the agents, urging them out of the room and towards the bank of elevators.

"What's going on?" Savoy looked even more primal than he did under normal circumstances. His right hand fondled his gun.

"The end, gentlemen."


End file.
